Edward Miliband: No, waiting times are rising. I notice that the Prime Minister did not even take the opportunity to take responsibility for the health policy. Where is the Health Secretary, after all? Where is he? It is becoming a pattern with this Prime Ministers. This morning, in the papers, we saw the Universities Minister being dumped on for his tuition fees policy; we see the Schools Secretary being dumped on for his free schools policy; and the poor Deputy Prime Minister just gets dumped on every day of the week. The Prime Minister must believe that something has gone wrong with his health policy, because he has launched his so-called listening exercise. Can he reassure doctors, nurses and patients that it is a genuine exercise?

William Hague: With permission, Mr Speaker, I will make a statement on Britain’s future diplomatic network.
	Our embassies and high commissions are the essential infrastructure of our country’s influence overseas and of our economic recovery. They provide an early warning system for threats to our security and to wider peace, and assist British nationals in times of crisis. They support our economy and help British businesses to access markets abroad. They promote our values of democracy and political freedom across the world, and help to craft vital international agreements from nuclear proliferation to climate change. We could not do without them for a single day.
	I promised in our first week in office as the coalition Government that there would be no strategic shrinkage of Britain’s diplomatic influence overseas under this Government, and that instead we would strengthen Britain’s diplomatic network. Today 1 want to set out how we will achieve this while saving money overall.
	The spending review settlement for the Foreign Office requires a 10% real-terms reduction in the budget. That is, of course, on top of years of unplanned cuts after the last Government stripped the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget, more than half of which is spent in foreign currencies, of its protection against exchange rate fluctuations in 2007, just before the sharp fall of sterling. In the last two years before the general election, the Foreign Office experienced a 14% real-terms reduction in its budget, resulting in the sudden loss of personnel and training in many embassies. The Foreign Affairs Committee has done much to sound a warning about these matters, and I have been unable to find any other major Foreign Ministry in the world that raises and reduces its diplomatic activity on the basis of movements in exchange rates. I promised to put an end to that ludicrous situation, and the protection is now being restored under a new foreign currency mechanism agreed with the Treasury. That means that the Foreign Office can once again plan properly for the future.
	Fortified by that ability to plan, we will find £100 million per year of administrative savings by the end of the Parliament, on a carefully planned basis. We will save over £30 million by simplifying procedures, removing bureaucracy and ensuring that administrative work overseas is done by locally recruited staff or in regional centres. We will save over £34 million a year from our annual estates and security costs, for instance by moving to a single site in London. We will reduce our annual staff costs by £30 million a year by 2014 by reducing to a minimum the number of junior staff posted overseas from London, by removing or reorganising their positions or recruiting locally. We will do so in consultation with staff to mitigate the impact on individuals and their careers. Those savings are not easy but they are essential. They will allow us to live within the necessary financial constraints and to provide the diplomatic network we need for the future.
	We will now reverse the previous Government’s policy of closing embassies and reducing our diplomatic presence in key parts of the world, as a result of which 45 UK
	posts were closed after 1997, including six in Africa, seven in Latin America and eight in Asia, and the overall number of UK posts in the world fell by more than 30.
	We will embark on a substantial reinvigoration of the diplomatic network to make it ready for the 21st century, to expand our connections with the emerging powers of the world, and to signal that where Britain was retreating, it is now advancing. The case for a strengthened network is utterly compelling. The only way to increase our national prosperity and secure growth for our economy is through trade, and our embassies play a vital role in supporting British business. The emerging powers are expanding their diplomatic networks. Turkey is opening many new posts and Brazil already has more posts in more countries in Africa than Britain has. Given that political influence will follow economic trends in the world and increasingly shift to the countries of the south and east over the long term, we need to plan ahead and create the right network for the future.
	Although we are working closely with the new European External Action Service and ensuring that talented British candidates enter it, there is not and will never be any substitute for a strong British diplomatic service that advances the interests of the United Kingdom. We can never rely on anyone else to do that.
	We will therefore significantly increase our presence in India and China, the world’s two emerging superpowers. We will strengthen our front-line staff in China by up to 50 officials and in India by 30, and will work to transform Britain’s relationship with their fastest growing cities and regions. We will also expand substantially our diplomatic strength in Brazil, Turkey, Mexico and Indonesia. We will add diplomatic staff in the following countries and places: Thailand, Burma, South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Angola, Botswana, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Panama, Peru, Pakistan, Vietnam and the Philippines.
	We will maintain the strength of our delegations to multilateral institutions, such as the United Nations in New York and Geneva, NATO, and the European Union in Brussels, all of whom have done an outstanding job in recent months. We will maintain our active and substantial embassy in Washington and our network of consulates general across the United States, which remains our indispensable ally in defence, security, foreign policy and commerce.
	We have a strong network in the middle east and north Africa, on which the demands have been so great in recent months. Although there is no need to open new posts there, we have frequently and substantially reinforced our diplomats there in recent months and have sent a special mission to Benghazi. Over the coming months, we will review the need for additional deployments.
	This expansion does come at a price. In Europe, there have already been significant savings in our diplomatic network. I am determined not to hollow out our embassies there, but we will need to find further savings in recognition of the fact that only three of the world’s 30 richest cities in total gross domestic product terms are in Europe, and the fact that our embassies there still cost more than elsewhere. So although we will fully maintain our embassy network across Europe, we will also find additional resource for our expansion elsewhere in the world from the network of subordinate posts in Europe outside capital cities. We will withdraw diplomatic staff from
	some subordinate posts, while retaining UK Trade & Investment and consular staff in many cases. That will lead to there being fewer subordinate posts in European countries.
	With those additional resources we will be able to open new British embassies, including in places where they had previously been closed. We will reopen the embassy in El Salvador, closed in 2003, as part of a major diplomatic advance in Latin America after years of retreat. We will open a new consulate general in Brazil at Recife, which will be one of approximately seven new consulates general that we will open in the emerging powers. We will open a new embassy in strategically important Kyrgyzstan, and another in July in the new nation of South Sudan.
	I always doubted the last Government’s decision to close the embassy in Madagascar, to which I know many Members of all parties objected. I am delighted to say that we will reopen that embassy as soon as the local political situation is right. I will also consider upgrading our political office in Côte d’Ivoire to a full embassy. I have made provision within our budget to open a new embassy in Somalia when the security situation has improved sufficiently. It is vital for our security that we are present in the horn of Africa, so I have made that decision now so that we will be ready to open the new embassy as soon as possible.
	In addition to those new embassies, I give the House a commitment today that whereas the previous Government shut 17 sovereign posts in their time in office, we intend to retain all 140 existing British embassies and high commissions throughout the life of this Parliament. Other savings will be found as we reduce, over time, our diplomatic footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is very large relative to the rest of the network. As the nature of the UK military involvement in Afghanistan changes, we will redeploy staff elsewhere.
	The strength of our embassies is a signal to the world of our engagement and our role in international peace and security. They are the platform for the strong bilateral relations that are increasingly vital in a networked world, and indispensable to success in multilateral diplomacy. Our decisions will mean that our reach when British companies need assistance or British nationals are in danger will go further and be stronger. That is why the maintenance, extension and strengthening of our global diplomatic network is a central objective of this Government and will be a priority for the use of Foreign and Commonwealth Office funds over the coming years.
	Although I have increased programme funding in the FCO to £139 million this year, our financial constraints and the priority that I am placing on retaining and improving our diplomatic network for the future mean that it will have to fall in future years, although it will remain above £100 million. I am sure it is right to give priority to long-term relations and the reversal of Britain’s strategic shrinkage.
	This development of our network should be seen alongside the diplomatic excellence initiative that I have instigated in the FCO, which began six months ago. That places a renewed emphasis on policy creativity, in-depth knowledge of other nations, geographic and linguistic expertise and the enhancement of traditional diplomatic skills in a manner suitable for the modern
	world. A combination of strict savings in administrative spending, reductions in our subordinate posts in Europe and the other savings that I have set out will allow us, for the first time in many years, to mount a diplomatic advance. For the first time in decades, our diplomatic reach will be extended, not reduced. That is the right use of public money, and it is the right course for Britain in this century.
	This Government will work to build up Britain’s influence in the world, to forge stronger bilateral relations with emerging giants and some old allies that have been neglected for too long, and to seize opportunities for prosperity and advance democratic values. We will maintain and enhance the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as a central Department of State leading an ambitious and distinctive British foreign policy, and we will expand and use Britain’s diplomatic network to the very full, in the interests of the United Kingdom and in support of the wider peace and security of the world.

Mike Gapes: The Foreign Secretary has already referred to the reports produced by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the last Parliament and in this one. He will be aware that just before the general election the Committee made a number of serious recommendations. I congratulate him on announcing the implementation of several of them in the statement today, particularly those relating to the embassy in Kyrgyzstan and to the scrapping of the overseas price mechanism to bring back some form of
	stability. Will he take a similar attitude to the Select Committee reports produced during this Parliament, and particularly to our recommendation that he reverse the cuts in the BBC World Service?

Laura Sandys: I beg to move,
	That leave be given to bring in a Bill to prohibit local authorities granting planning permission involving the development of Grade 1 agricultural land other than in exceptional circumstances; and for connected purposes.
	The Bill aims to reinstate the protection that was in place when food production was one of our national security considerations and was seen as a strategic asset. Although there is guidance on development on agricultural land, it does not provide a sufficiently robust defence of what I believe is a national asset. However, the Government have an excellent opportunity to include the objectives of my Bill in the forthcoming national policy planning frameworks. I hope that, unlike the previous Government, this Government do not see the countryside as merely a public amenity space or an aesthetic experience for urban dwellers to enjoy. Grade 1 agricultural land is important and has strategic implications for all our constituents, urban and rural.
	Let us be clear that once highly productive land has been built on, there is no going back—it has gone for ever. Some might ask, “Who cares?” The reason why food production should be of interest to everyone is that we are increasingly vulnerable to global food price rises that have an impact on each and every one of our constituents. International protectionism, climate change and increased global population are all resulting in significant volatility in the food sector. We must therefore do what we are doing in the energy sector, and regard national food production as part of our national security agenda. An essential part of that agenda is ensuring that we do not reduce our ability to produce food domestically, and land use is at the heart of the issue.
	Agriculture, food production and land use are distant concepts to many of our constituents. I myself was brought up in London, far from anything to do with the world of farming. Do the majority of our constituents worry about whether a farm is turned into a golf course or whether some fields are sold for development? That does not affect us, and if we gain a new business park houses or some new houses and the farmer can retire to the Caribbean on the proceeds, good for him.
	Our lack of appreciation of food production is due to the fact that our capacity to produce food is not seen as a strategic asset. It is no longer considered to be important to our economy and the well-being of our population. As a result, the amount of arable land in the United Kingdom has decreased by 30% and food imports have increased to 47% over the past 20 years—of course, no one has been on the streets protesting.
	The ideal combination of globally sourced food and reasonable prices was shaken in 2008. There was a perfect storm of bad weather conditions, crop failures, a change in global consumption patterns, a 50% leap in the cost of a barrel of oil and some speculation, and commodity prices rocketed by 66%. The food price spike was further compounded by a new phenomenon, food protectionism. Global variations in food prices fluctuated dramatically. Countries that withheld exports,
	such as Indonesia, were able to keep their domestic prices down, but those that did not experienced a much higher rate of food inflation, which created real political instability. Unfortunately, that experience revealed the short-term benefits of protectionism, and it has created a new political and economic reality that might lead to further protectionism and exacerbate food volatility. Much of this has passed us by, however. Food security and food prices are rarely, if ever, raised in the House, and few of our constituents are particularly concerned so long as the supermarket shelves are full of what they want to buy at a price that they are prepared to pay.
	The price of food should be making the future of productive land an important concern for us all. The Foresight report on food security stresses that
	“the past century of low food prices is at an end.”
	Agricultural production will become a much more important industry sector, and at this time when food production is so important, we have no restrictions in place to stop developers tarmacing over our own highly productive food-producing land.
	Price is starting to impact on my constituents. In my constituency, the average wage is just £17,000 and therefore more money as a percentage of income is spent on food than in many other areas. My constituents are noticing prices. I had a gentleman in my surgery this weekend who said that he had had a heart attack and was told by his doctor that good fresh food was essential to his health. As he is on jobseeker’s allowance, he cannot afford to eat good food and is now reverting to buying cheap junk food.
	Supermarkets are extending their promotional offers, as they know more than anyone the extent to which prices are rising, but for how long will they be able to resist passing on the increased commodity costs to the consumer? Prices are increasing, nutritional standards will fall, the vulnerable in our constituencies will have to revert to the cheapest food possible, and—following on from those who have protested about fuel price increases—we will receive more post from people on the subject of food prices. There is a good reason for that. Commodity prices in April were 4.7% higher than in the same period last year. I hope the Treasury is looking into the impact that that will have on economic growth and inflation; the Bank of England certainly is. Kraft Foods has announced that it will be raising its food prices, which will hit every one of our constituents. The cost of food is also increasing, because of the high
	reliance on energy in agriculture, while the British Chamber of Shipping calculates that sea transport costs are increasing due to piracy, and the degradation of land due to droughts, flooding or urbanisation will put further stresses on existing productive land, yet we have no statutory defence against those who might want to build on our most productive land.
	We must start to approach food security with the same zeal that we approach energy security. Domestic energy supply is seen as critical to our long-term energy security. We seem to understand that reliance on volatile suppliers of energy is bad for economic growth, stability and consumers, and for food security, too, we need to start to put in place the measures that will give us further certainty in terms of price, production and vulnerability of supply.
	As the Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), will know, according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England by 2030 Kent will lose 10% of its productive land due to sea level rises, so we will be losing productive land in any case due to climate change and sea level rises. It would be mad at the same time to lose additional productive land when we have the powers to stop that happening.
	I urge the Minister to take on board the genuine importance of this Bill for wider economic and social needs, to recognise that the protection it offers grade 1 agricultural land must be incorporated into the national policy planning frameworks, and to ensure that food production is seen as an increasingly important part of our domestic security. I realise that protecting grade 1 agricultural land is not the sole answer to food insecurity and price increases, and I am not proposing food sovereignty, but land use protection is one of the mechanisms that we must put in place in order to reduce our exposure to the volatility of the international market. Therefore, we must, at the very least, not lose more productive land than we have lost to date.
	Question put and agreed to.
	Ordered,
	That Laura Sandys, Zac Goldsmith, Mr Tim Yeo, Mr Roger Gale, Caroline Lucas, Rebecca Harris, Bill Esterson, Elizabeth Truss, Richard Drax, Priti Patel and Mr Dominic Raab present the Bill.
	Laura Sandys accordingly presented the Bill.
	Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 14 October, and to be printed (Bill 187).

Richard Fuller: It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) for the second time in succession. It has also been a great pleasure to participate in proceedings in Committee on the Bill. I am still relatively new to the House and I found it encouraging, compared with the spectacle that we see at Prime Minister’s Question Time, to see parties on both sides coming together to put their experience and best interests at the forefront of trying to improve education in our country. I pay tribute to all the parties for doing that.
	I should like to comment mainly on my new clause 1, but first I shall make a couple of points about special educational needs, which the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) has mentioned. It was a great pleasure, a week ago, to welcome the Secretary of State for Education to Bedford to talk to the head teachers of our three special schools, the Grange, Ridgeway and St Johns, and to talk about the Green Paper. The coalition Government have moved forward significantly in understanding what is required for children with SEN not only while they are at school but when they are preparing to go on to the work environment. That is a record that the Government can build on over the next five years and which will be a tremendous success and tribute to them. The Secretary of State’s discussion with the head teachers in Bedford and Kempston was most illuminating. Two of those three schools are outstanding and one is good with outstanding features, so they are already providing excellent education to children, and their knowledge and experience is most valuable.
	It is important to consider the particular impact of the Bill on exclusions. The Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), knows how important this issue is, particularly for children with autism and the impact on them if they are later excluded. I hope that he will take into account the recommendations of the special educational consortium about future decisions so that he can make sure that the issue of exclusion does not have an undue impact on children with autism.
	New clause 1 would pay particular attention to schools with a history of educational underachievement, by which I mean achieving below the minimum national floor standards for a number of years. It would give the Secretary of State the powers that he or she might require in such circumstances to intervene to support change and to provide educational opportunity to the children in those areas. The new clause is not about passing comment on teachers; indeed, the teachers who go to poorly performing schools are sometimes the most inspired and capable teachers in the country.
	The new clause is not about resources either. Too often, when we look at educational underachievement we think that throwing money at it will solve the problem,
	but often it does not tackle the problem directly. Indeed, it can hide the problem or provide an excuse for continuing with underachievement while the benefit of the additional resources comes into play. That is all very well when one is looking at a five-year investment to do something as a business, but the critical urgency is that every child gets only one chance at each year of their education. Every year of delay in overcoming educational underachievement is a year lost to a whole cohort of children that will not be recovered. In those circumstances—I will go on to explain how they arise—it would be a mistake for the Secretary of State not to have the opportunity to intervene to provide hope to that cohort.
	My concern is with providing the opportunity for fast action to be taken to remedy a legacy of educational underachievement, because, as we have rightly heard many times, educational underachievement compounds social separation. Hon. Members on both sides of the House recognise that a good start to education in the early years leads to better educational attainment in later years and greater chance of success in later life. When educational achievement is combined with catchment areas, the problem of social separation is compounded, with housing stock and rental prices around underachieving schools going down and with parents flocking to areas where schools perform well. I see that happen in my constituency and my borough. That effect compounds the view taken by parents that particular schools are bad. I do not know whether there is such a thing as a bad school or a good school—a school is a school—but we have a responsibility to ensure that parents do not have to make the terrible sacrifices that many make. Some parents put enormous effort into getting their child into a school other than the local, “bad” school and then they have to spend an hour or so driving their child to that “good” school to avoid the other school. That is precisely because we have this tyranny of catchment areas, which may be compounded despite the best efforts of my right hon. and hon. Members on the Front Bench to improve educational performance if they do not have more power to be more radical than they are providing for themselves in the Bill.
	The Government have made substantial progress, particularly, as the right hon. Member for Birkenhead mentioned, with the significant advance of the pupil premium. I would add to that the potential advance of free schools, which should be embraced on both sides of the House as part of an effort to get our teachers to address educational underachievement. If I have one criticism of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State it is that he listens too much to those who believe he is too radical in that area; there is plenty of scope for him to be more radical.
	The problem that the new clause seeks to address is the situation that arises when members of a local community combine to frustrate those who would challenge the existing orthodoxy. However, it focuses only on areas where that orthodoxy is failing children by maintaining a standard of education that is below the national minimum accepted standard. In those circumstances, which I know from my own area can persist, a local authority may not take action with a school and the school may have absolutely no interest in taking action itself. The school will always seek to have more time and the local authority will always want to maintain its influence and control over the school. Such a system
	might not be failing the local authority or certain teachers, but by heavens it is surely failing the children whom our educational system is supposed to be serving.
	Let me give an example that comes readily to mind: the efforts in my constituency to establish a new academy, the Kempston free school, in an area of educational underachievement. I shall not use this opportunity to talk specifically about the teachers or the actions of particular teachers in those schools. They work extremely hard to get improvement for the pupils, but over the past five years satisfactory results have not been achieved overall. What has the borough council done about that? It has asked for more time. What have schools tried to do? They are trying to do their best, but the results have not yet met the national minimum standards.
	One teacher resigned his job, worked with local parents and wanted to take up the freedoms that this Government have permitted to establish a free school in his area. He had a passion for education and directed that passion at an area of economic and educational disadvantage. That is what everyone who has a passion for education should seek to support. The reaction of the local authority was, essentially, to kick the scheme into the long grass, pretend that it cared, go along with the process, make sure that it checked the boxes that the Government said it must check, but in reality to stifle and seek to eradicate the effort and initiative of those volunteers.
	What was the reaction of the schools? They made some good points. What would be the impact on their budget? What would happen with falling rolls when children decided to go not to the existing schools but to the new school? Those are valid points and ones that I wanted to raise with the Secretary of State, but I needed a free school there to do it. It is far better for that discussion about how best to allocate resources in areas of educational underachievement to take place among establishments than to maintain the line that continuing to put funds into a school that is failing is a sign of one’s commitment to education, because it is not.
	Educational commitment is what motivated Mark Lehain and the parents and volunteers who supported the Kempston free school. They were inspired to help children in their area, and they were stymied by a local authority and by the efforts of local schools. They wanted a site. The local authority had plenty of sites that it could have made available. Did it welcome the group with open arms? No. It did the minimum required to ensure that it accommodated the Government’s process.
	Let us look at the other side. Whereas the local authority can pull its whole local bureaucracy full time to the effort, and the educational establishment can use its incumbency and the loyalty that parents naturally have to their school, regardless of its overall educational performance, what could the free school people draw on? They could draw on their inspiration. They could quit their job to demonstrate their passion. They could get parents and others to say, “Yes, we really want to do it,” but that was never going to be a match for the combined resources of the local authority and the local teaching establishment.
	What was worse were the actions of our teaching unions and the Anti Academies Alliance and its fellow travellers in the Local Schools Network, who will crush anyone who threatens the orthodoxy of our teaching establishment. It is a disgrace that those unions flood local meetings to make political points, rather than
	allowing local meetings, which are part of the consultation process, truly to represent the interests of local parents and teachers. It is disgraceful that people will attack others for their passion when they have an inspiration to provide education for children, albeit not through the established ways, but through a free school. Those people are teachers and care about education just as much as any other teacher. Why is it legitimate for those teachers to be attacked for trying to find an alternative way to serve their local community?
	In all these efforts, when the only thing that the people who wished to set up these schools in areas of educational underachievement have is their own inspiration and voluntary effort, I say they need extra help from a Secretary of State who can say, “Here we have the evidence. You have had years of educational underachievement. Here we see that you are not fulfilling your overall mission to educate people in your area. You have an opportunity to do so by providing another academy and I, the Secretary of State, will intervene, disapply all the things that stand in the way and all the tools that can be used to stop people making that advance, and provide that lifeline of support so that children in areas of educational underachievement will have fresh hope and opportunity.”
	That is what parents in such areas expect from a Conservative Government and a coalition Government. That is what they were hoping for when they got the pupil premium. That is what they are looking to the Bill to provide—an extension of power from the Secretary of State to local areas. I hope the Minister will listen and seek to embrace that vision as he moves forward. In a few years we will look back on this period, with the current Secretary of State, as a great opportunity to help many who are suffering severe economic and educational disadvantage. New clause 1 seeks to achieve that.

Nick Gibb: I will speak fist to new clause 1, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller), and new clause 13, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah), who both served, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland), on the Bill Committee. I welcome the strong support for the Government’s expansion of the academies programme that lies behind both new clauses. There are now more than 650 academies, more than two thirds of which have opened since September 2010, and that is equivalent to more than two every working day. I am proud that the coalition has achieved this pace of expansion in its first year in office. I believe that it is vital to ensure that the benefits of academy status are used to address underperformance in our education system.
	As my hon. Friends will know from their scrutiny in Committee, the Bill includes measures to strengthen the
	Secretary of State’s power to intervene in underperforming schools. We are strengthening those powers to ensure that we can take the necessary action to invite an effective academy sponsor to transform a school where children are receiving an unacceptably low standard of education and the governing body and the local authority are reluctant to intervene.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Bedford mentioned exclusions, special educational needs and, in particular, children with autism. I welcome his support for the Green Paper on special educational needs and disability. He is right to raise those issues. I, along with officials, recently met the Special Educational Consortium to discuss the matter. I look forward to continued discussion with it on the Bill as it progresses through the House and another place. He rightly highlighted the fact that even with the Bill’s new provisions, many schools will still not be eligible for intervention, despite performing below the minimum floor standard. Ofsted’s inspection judgments in recent years have not always paid sufficient attention to the quality of teaching when identifying schools that require special measures or a notice to improve. I welcome the fact that the changes to the inspection framework proposed by Ofsted start to address that issue.
	I share my hon. Friend’s concern that no excuses should be made for low standards. He may be right that the current proposals do not go far enough in allowing my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to intervene swiftly in schools that perform below the minimum floor standard. However, we need to be sure that, in any changes we make, there are appropriate safeguards in place for schools to ensure that the Secretary of State is not left open to legal challenge that might continue to frustrate the conversion process.
	On new clauses 1 and 13, I sympathise with my hon. Friends’ desire to ensure that unnecessary hurdles do not get in the way of the efficient transformation of poorly performing schools. However, there is a need to ensure appropriate safeguards. We have been convinced by the weight of opinion across both Houses that appropriate local consultation should inform conversion to academy status. The ability to disapply such requirements when converting poorly performing schools, as proposed in the new clause 1, is not something we are seeking. For those reasons I cannot accept the new clause.

Lindsay Hoyle: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
	New clause 10—Fair access to education and training
	‘(1) EA 1996 is amended as follows.
	(2) In section 10 (General duty of the Secretary of State), at the end insert “and ensure fair access to opportunity for education and training.”.’.
	New clause 22—Guidance on draft Regulations on pupil registration and school attendance codes
	‘The Secretary of State shall provide guidance to local authorities for dealing with families who have chosen to home educate their children prior to the implementation of the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations and the School Attendance and Absence codes.’.
	Amendment 40,in clause 4, page9,line26, at end add
	‘The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament an annual report on the numbers of students at all schools in England and Wales subject to these powers including—
	(a) details as to whether these pupils have identified special educational needs or additional learning needs,
	(b) the numbers of times these powers have been exercised,
	(c) the previous and current status of their schooling provision,
	(d) whether their exclusion was referred to a review panel, and
	(e) where known the outcome of any review panel action including any financial adjustment of the schools budget share for a funding period incurred by schools as a direct consequence of the exclusion.’.
	Amendment 9,in clause 34, page33,line4, at end insert—
	‘(1A) In section 84 (Code for school admissions) in subsection (2) after “other matters”, insert “which ensure fair access to opportunity for education”.’.
	Amendment 10,page33,line5, leave out subsection (2).
	Amendment 13,page33,line14, leave out subsection (3) and insert—
	‘(3) For section 88J (changes to admission arrangements by schools adjudicator) substitute—
	“88J Implementation of decisions by adjudicator
	(1) This section applies where the adjudicator has made a decision (‘the primary decision’)—
	(a) under section 88H(4) on whether to uphold an objection to admission arrangements, or
	(b) under section 88I(4)(b) or (5)(b) on whether admission arrangements conform with the requirements relating to admissions.
	(2) If the admission authority has not amended its admission arrangements within a period of 14 days of being notified of the primary decision, the local authority for the area in which the school is situated may direct appropriate changes to any aspect of the admission arrangements in consequence of the primary decision.
	(3) Following the amendment of the admission arrangements by the admission authority following a primary decision, the local authority for the area, if it considers that the changes to the admission arrangements are not consistent with the primary decision, may direct appropriate changes to any aspect of the admission arrangements in consequence of the primary decision.
	(4) An admission authority which is subject to a direction under subsections (2) or (3) may ask the adjudicator to set aside the direction on the grounds that the changes to the admission arrangements contained in the local authority’s direction are not consistent with the primary decision.”.’.
	Amendment 11,in schedule 10, page83,line4, leave out paragraphs 1 to 3.

Graham Brady: Absolutely. The right hon. Gentleman is entirely correct. No new selective schools would be created under the new clause. The country would have the same schools that it has at the moment, but those schools would be able to accept people regardless of parental means and the ability to pay. It would bring more excellent schools into the state sector, satisfying the objective of the Minister.
	This is not a theoretical situation. I first became interested in this area because many years ago, two independent schools in my constituency did precisely this. They opted into the state sector, in those days as grant-maintained schools. St Ambrose college and Loreto grammar school, which are both Roman Catholic selective schools, were welcomed by a previous Conservative Government into the state sector, and were allowed to maintain their ethos and admissions rules. St Ambrose college is an excellent school, which educated three Members of this House, including my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds). This could be called the St Ambrose and Loreto new clause.
	Not only would the new clause restore the ability for excellent independent schools to come into the state sector in the way that they could under the previous Conservative Government; it would end the unfortunate state of affairs that has pertained since. Again, that is not a theoretical point. Some years ago, William Hulme’s grammar school in Manchester became an academy, but under the previous Government it was forced to abandon its selective admissions policy and become a comprehensive school. It is still a good school, but regrettably, it was required to change its ethos in a way that it had no desire to do. More worryingly, that process is continuing today. As the Minister knows, Batley grammar school is in the process of becoming an academy. Shockingly, under the present Government, it, too, is being required to change its ethos and its admissions policy in a way that would not have been required had it been a state school transferring to academy status.
	I am aware of other independent schools that would be interested in pursuing this route if the Minister and the Secretary of State were to open the door to them. That point is important. Typically, these are schools that value their independence and their selective ethos, but have no desire to charge fees that might deny access to some able boys and girls who would benefit from the education that they offer. Frequently, like Batley grammar school, they are not in the most prosperous parts of the country. This measure would clearly extend opportunity to a significant number of children in less affluent parts of the country.

Andy Burnham: As my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West says, this is a nudge with a loaded gun. Of course schools will focus on the English baccalaureate! If he expects us to believe that that will not happen, he is taking us for mugs. The baccalaureate will obviously drive behaviour in our school system. The Ministers know that that is what they are doing, but they are trying to pretend that it will not happen. I am telling the Minister that it will.

Andy Burnham: I am grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker. As I have said before, the Secretary of State is in danger of collapsing under the weight of his own contradictions, and the hon. Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker) has just made that point.
	Let me return to the admissions code, which we have not seen. I hope the Minister will give the House an apology this afternoon for failing to produce it. We hear that it will be slimmed down, and that it will allow founders of free schools to leapfrog local families to the front of the queue for places—the so-called Toby Young clause. The Opposition can accept a simpler admissions code, but we will not accept a weaker admissions code.
	The Government’s failure to produce the code leaves us asking one question: what are they trying to hide? That is a relevant question given that today we have further evidence, from the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady), of the true Tory instincts on education. His new clause 2 would allow independent schools that cross over to the state sector to continue selective admissions policies, as he confirmed to me, which means that formerly independent fee-paying schools would be fully funded by the taxpayer, but would remain exclusive schools selecting students on the basis of ability. I notice that 35 or more of his colleagues felt free to put their names to this outrageous expansion of selection, presumably because they are being encouraged by his own Whips and Front Benchers.
	At a Friends of Grammar Schools reception in Parliament last year, hosted by the hon. Gentleman, the Secretary of State was asked for his view on whether his free school movement could allow the expansion of selection. He reportedly replied:
	“My foot is hovering over the pedal; I’ll have to see what my co-driver Nick Clegg has to say”.
	Well, I think we know what the Deputy Prime Minister will do: he will talk about being muscular, but then offer no resistance whatsoever. Indeed, Tory voices today are crowing about the right-wing nature of the school reforms before the House. I urge Liberal Democrats to live up to their recent statements, particularly since Thursday, and to implement the policy passed at last year’s Liberal Democrat conference.
	I urge Liberal Democrats, too, to listen to the independent experts. When asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) in the Education Select Committee whether he would make the changes to admissions set out in the Bill, the schools adjudicator replied:
	“I wouldn’t, no. The only changes I would be introducing, as I said to the Chair, is the extension of our role to take on academies and free schools. I don’t think that I would be taking out any of the admissions changes suggested in the Bill.”
	The Children’s Commissioner said:
	“Reduced accountability in the admissions system also risks increasing the social segregation in schools”.
	The Association of School and College Leaders said:
	“While we accept the limitations of the Local Authority and Admissions Forums we are concerned that there may now be a void in policing admissions.”
	Barnardo’s said:
	“As the Bill stands, it is likely that in the future there could be a variety of admission arrangements within local areas—resulting in selection and segregation.”
	These warnings could not be clearer.

Ian Mearns: The schools Minister has reiterated that the English baccalaureate will not be an accountability measure. He trumpeted that in the Select Committee on a number of occasions last week. I am terribly sorry but the response is one of complete and utter incredulity. I know what the press will say about the English baccalaureate within the context of the league tables. The headline writers will say, “Of course it will be an accountability measure. How can it be seen as anything else?”

Graham Stuart: The hon. Gentleman is entitled to his views on how current regulation should be changed. That, after all, was what the Badman report and our Select Committee report were all about.
	What I am discussing today—I do not want to take up much more time—is the current law, which is clear, although it is not properly represented by many local authorities. I will not go through all the legal aspects, but I will mention the 2007 guidelines on elective home education for local authorities, which were produced by the Department for Children, Schools and Families in 2007. It is still available on the departmental website, subject only to the need for an update to take into account changes in the rules governing children missing from education. The report stated:
	“Local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of home education on a routine basis.”
	If there is no evidence that education by home educators is inferior to that provided by the state, what is the role of the state? Apparently it is to stick its nose into families that have often been let down by the same instruments of the state and impertinently to try to impose exactly the same kind of regimented approach to education that failed for those children. That is why the parents made the massive sacrifice of taking their children out of school in the first place.
	We must defend freedom and a principle that is perhaps even more important than that, which is that the law, as it stands, must be enforced. If the hon. Member for Huddersfield wishes to campaign to get it changed and is successful in convincing this place, what he wants will then become the law. Local authorities must honour and observe the law as it stands and not overstate it because they happen to agree with the hon. Gentleman. They cannot make the law up as they go along because they do not like the current settlement. The current settlement is clear: local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of home education.
	I have already dealt with Tameside, so let me touch quickly on Barnsley. Its elective home education information leaflet says that
	“the law allows parents to educate their children at home instead of sending them to school, if they fulfil certain conditions.”
	That is subtly done. I am not sure whether it is strictly inaccurate, but it is suggestive enough to make it sound as though the council decides whether those conditions are fulfilled. It goes on to make it clear that that is precisely its conclusion:
	“Barnsley MBC will need to be satisfied”—
	in other words, the council will need to be satisfied—
	“that a child is receiving suitable education at home, and the Assessor”—
	these people are even called assessors; who do they think they are?—
	“will ask to meet with the family in order to talk to the parents and to look at examples of work and learning.”
	That is beyond the law. I want the Minister to confirm that he will make sure that local authorities no longer produce misinformation like that and use it in order to abuse their power over families.
	Sheffield provides another example. Parents there are told:
	“You must show that the opportunities being provided are helping your child to learn and that development is taking place appropriate to their age, ability and aptitude.”
	It is fair enough for parents to have a duty to provide suitable education and meet those requirements, but local authorities have no right to interpose themselves and decide that that is not happening. If they have reason to believe that suitable education is not being provided, they have a duty to challenge, but only in that event. They do not have the right routinely to monitor and interfere.
	Sheffield city council continues:
	“The Children Service Authority (CSA) is responsible for ensuring that the arrangements provide a suitable education for your child.”
	That is not true.
	“When you have given the CSA a plan stating your ideas an appropriately qualified”
	—unlike you—
	“Senior Inclusion Officer (SIO) will arrange an initial home visit and make a preliminary assessment”
	—in your home—
	“of the education provision the child is receiving.”
	It is disgraceful.
	South Gloucestershire council is advertising for someone who will provide
	“information, support and challenge to parents…The service is responsible for assessing the suitability of the education provided to children educated at home”.
	The Lancashire local authority, in one of the most egregious examples, states:
	“Lancashire Officers will take the lead on this because they have the responsibility to ensure the safety of all children as well as to monitor the quality of education received by children educated at home.”
	That is a nice one, neatly conflating the issues of safety and home education. No one has yet arrived at my house during the summer holidays just to check up on the safety of my children, who are, after all, spending months at home with me. Who knows what my wife and I might get up to, or what the younger or older sister might do? Who knows what visiting relatives might do? What we need are visitors from the local authority, just to make sure. I do not want people such as the director of children’s services in my local authority to lose a moment’s sleep because they feel that they are not pursuing every possibility of intervention to cover their own backsides and telling me how I should run things in my own home. That is precisely what the local authority suggests should be done in the case of home-educating parents, who deserve its intervention no more than the rest of us. The document continues:
	“Thus, when a practitioner or professional becomes aware that a child is being educated at home, they should use local information sharing arrangements to help the Lancashire Authority to fulfil both its duty to be confident”
	—so it has a duty to be confident now—
	“of the well-being of the child and its duty to assure the quality of the education provided.”
	That, too, is not true.
	As far as I can tell from one evening spent looking at their websites, council after council is entirely misrepresenting the legal position, and I hope that the Minister will put that right.

Stella Creasy: My hon. Friend is exactly right. The amendment is about implementation. How do we make sure that as the new policies are introduced, there are not unintended consequences, or perhaps even intended consequences, that we will have to deal with further down the line?
	The evidence shows clearly that a large percentage of the children who are excluded from schools have special educational needs—87% of children excluded from primary schools and 60% of children excluded from secondary schools have identified special educational needs. A significant number of those children have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and mental health issues. Many do not receive the special educational needs provision that would help to keep them in mainstream schooling. For example, a number of children have to wait more than a year to access a mental health counsellor. Clearly, that impacts on schools’ ability to cope with those young people.
	The amendment has been tabled today because of the concern that the Bill will create disincentives for schools to deal with those young people and instead, encourage schools to exclude them and so pass them on to somebody
	else to deal with, rather than taking responsibility for their educational needs. All of us acknowledge that the way in which children with special educational needs are supported in the education system should improve. That is not an issue of contention between parties. The question is how we do that.
	In Committee some of us expressed severe reservations about considering the Bill without the Green Paper on special educational needs being available to compare and contrast. The Green Paper was published while we were in Committee, and we are grateful that that was not at 4.55 pm on a Friday, but it raised more questions than it answered about how children with special educational needs will fare under this Government.

Nick Gibb: The example that the hon. Lady gives applies to one individual, but an objection to admission arrangements applies to an entire school, and therefore to a wider range of people, which means that consultation is necessary before those changes are made. That is the difference between the two examples.[Official Report, 13 May 2011, Vol. 527, c. 11MC.]
	There is something else wrong with Opposition Front Benchers’ amendment 13. It would give the 152 local authorities a power to direct, but those local authorities are themselves the admissions authorities for about 19,000 schools in England, and it cannot make sense to give them the power to direct themselves, which in essence is what the amendment would do. Nor is the amendment consistent with our general thrust to allow schools the flexibility to put matters right themselves. Adjudicator decisions carry the full weight of law, and any attempt to thwart them through undue delay risks further legal challenge and possible direction from either the Secretary of State or the courts. All admissions authorities, including academies and voluntary-aided schools, must comply with binding decisions, and we believe that exactly how they do so is best judged by the schools themselves. However, when they do so will be just as important in ensuring that we do not create chaos in our admissions system. I believe that we have struck the right balance between national parameters and local pragmatism, so I ask hon. Members not to press their amendments.
	I turn to amendment 40, in the name of the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). She and, through an intervention, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) explained that they were seeking to ensure that the impact of the changes made by the Bill to the exclusions process were clearly understood. I agree that it is important to understand what is happening in schools on such an important issue, and as I set out in Committee, extensive statistics have already been published on the number of permanent and fixed-period exclusions, including for each local authority and ethnic group, as too have national and local authority level statistics on SEN exclusions, both statemented and non-statemented. In collecting information, however, it is important to eliminate the risk of revealing the identities of individual children, and in some instances, numbers are likely to be far too low to deliver the level of detail sought by the hon. Lady’s amendment. If there are fewer than five exclusions in a local authority area, the numbers are not published.
	We collect information on the review panels, and will continue to do so for the new panels, including on how many cases are reviewed, the outcome of a panel’s decision and whether the pupil is reinstated by the school. I can confirm that we will also have details of when an adjustment of a school’s budget share is directed. However, I am happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss the precise data that she seeks to see whether we can accommodate her request, bearing in mind the fact that
	we have to ensure that we do not inadvertently publish very small numbers, which could inadvertently reveal the identities of individual children.

Nicholas Dakin: I want to cover three areas. The first relates to education maintenance allowance and the direction of the Government’s programme. One of my former students, Emma Donaldson, reminded me recently of the Prime Minister’s words just before the general election. He could not have been clearer when he said:
	“We have looked at educational maintenance allowances and we haven’t announced any plan to get rid of them”.
	Well, that didn’t last very long, did it? Emma wrote:
	“The Tories claim that the younger generation should not pay for the mistakes of the past generation, but with these slashes in allowances and the raising of tuition fees we are being asked to do exactly that.”
	We can add the disappearance of the future jobs fund to that list, and it is easy to understand why young people feel badly let down by this Government.
	The EMA is about far more than just boosting participation. It is also about attendance, achievement, motivation and welfare support. Giving evidence to the Select Committee, David Linnell, the principal of Cornwall college, warned:
	“If EMAs are reduced, and if the money is severely reduced, we will see two things. We will see a reduction in those students who come, stay and actually succeed.”
	He was talking about students not only coming to the college, but staying and succeeding.
	New clause 5 relates to one of the conditions for young people gaining an award of the EMA, which is the motivational aspect of the award. I welcome the fact that the Government were taken kicking and screaming to listen to young people and their families, and that they improved the offer of money available. Even so, the amount available for young people in the new scheme has dropped from £560 million to £190 million, and recipients will receive significantly less in normal circumstances. Furthermore, 68% of colleges recently surveyed believe that recruitment to colleges will be severely affected as a result of these changes.
	My concern is about not only recruitment, but ensuring that, once recruited, the students are retained and that the motivational aspect of the EMA is retained in the new award, so that it can have an impact on motivation and achievement as well as on welfare support. The current consultation seems to look both ways, talking about national benchmarks as well as saying that all those matters can be decided locally. It is therefore unclear to what extent there will be a postcode lottery and to what extent the motivational aspects will be retained through certain conditions. It is clear that the most important condition relates to attendance, because it is easy to measure and maintain.
	Those are my comments on my first topic, so let me move on to new clause 11, which deals with my second topic—the provision of enrichment activities for post-16 students and the appropriate funding of the same. The cut in entitlement funding from 114 guided learning hours to 30 guided learning hours, which was made earlier this year for the coming year, has resulted in significant detriment to the funding of post-16 learning—it is essentially a 75% cut in entitlement, which translates into a 12% cut in overall funding.
	The new clause refers to the range of activities that benefited from that enrichment funding. It is ironic that on the day after the Government got into a muddle over the ill-thought-out idea to sell places at university, they should go out of their way to undermine the funding arrangements for post-16 and the development of the broader person that is necessary to allow young people from the state sector to compete on equal terms with those from other sectors. I hope that the Government will look carefully at those proposals on funding post-16 education.
	In April this year, the National Union of Teachers and the Employer Contact Unit conducted a snapshot survey on the impact of cuts on further education and sixth-form colleges. It found that the overwhelming majority of colleges—96%—had been told that their budgets would be significantly cut for 2011-12. Of those, more than nine out of 10 said that the cuts would have a negative impact on teaching and learning in their colleges. That survey highlights the immediate effect of the cuts to enrichment funding on young people now. That is a matter of huge concern—to me and many others—and it needs to be looked at. The new clause provides an opportunity for Ministers to do so.
	I have had conversations with Ministers and taken delegations to see them about what is happening on the front line of education, so I know that they have been surprised by the impact of the changes to enrichment funding. Those Ministers are sensible and serious people who will think about how best to make an adjustment as we go forward, so that the education system can continue to be robust and successful.
	My final point concerns quality careers guidance, which is covered by amendments 27, 28, 19, 29 and 18. The amendments are designed to ensure that the Bill’s suggestions are improved, so that we have high quality, face-to-face careers guidance and do not let it wither away. Life is already much harder and more competitive for Emma, whom I quoted earlier, and her generation. University is expensive and to get a job after studying many young people are expected to work for free to get their foot on the ladder, which is not a good thing. Young people might need well-connected parents to arrange an opportunity, but the young people whom I represent do not always have those advantages.
	By this Government’s actions, the careers service, the EMA, the future jobs fund and tuition fees—the ladders of support to help young people get on in life—are being systematically kicked away. Good quality personalised careers advice is essential to help young people make the best choices for their future. It is too important to be left to a postcode lottery.
	The concept of a postcode lottery is a theme running through my three main points. If we are not careful, we will have a postcode lottery on the education maintenance allowance; we will have a postcode lottery on enrichment activities; and we will have a postcode lottery on careers advice. That is not what we owe to this country’s young people. That is why our amendments are designed to secure proper conditionality around the EMA, a commitment to enrichment activities along with the proper funding necessary to put them back in place, and a commitment to secure a high standard of guidance in every school and college.

Iain Wright: I shall be brief, given the time constraints, and speak specifically to new clause 9. I agree with every word that was said by my hon. Friends the Members for Scunthorpe and for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) as well as by the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey). Their amendments are eminently sensible and would go a long way toward repairing the damage that in 12 short months the Government have inflicted on young people through their policies on the education maintenance allowance, enrichment activities and post-16 funding.
	The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning and the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb) will recall that we had considerable debate in Committee about clauses 26 and 27 and the changes to the careers service that was provided to young people. It became very apparent when the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning was questioned in Committee that no real work or thought had been given to the transition plan between the ending of Connexions and the establishment of the all-age careers service. The Minister conceded the possibility of having a careers summit to discuss the matter, which might be imminent, but it is probably about nine months too late and should have been designed into a clear transition plan. I know that he is genuinely and passionately committed to this issue, but his eye has been worryingly off the ball regarding the transition. This is inept.
	Although some services may be available in September, others will not be operational until April 2012. There is confusion about commitment to funding and there is a real risk that vital professional expertise will be lost; indeed, that is borne out by what is happening. A Unison survey of local authorities has shown that 97.5% of councils that responded were cutting the careers service in their area. In central Bedfordshire, personal advisers were being withdrawn at the end of the last autumn term and there is a lack of staff to cover statutory duties. In Essex, no one-to-one advice is being provided at all. Unison concludes that the survey confirms that
	“the level of cuts and the lack of clear transition guidance from central government are leading to the decimation of the careers service”.
	As the hon. Member for Wirral West and my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan have pointed out, expertise is being lost precisely when the country’s young people need it most. Students leaving school in a matter of weeks after doing their exams will be going out into a world in which conditions are the harshest they have been for a generation, with youth unemployment running at record levels and educational options for over-16s narrowed with the scrapping of EMA. It is becoming clearer by the day that Government policy seems to be moving us towards a higher education system that benefits the well-off rather than the more vulnerable.
	In those circumstances and in that economic context, it is vital that before young people leave school they receive the best possible information, advice and guidance about their prospects and options. The manner in which they receive such advice will vary according to their personal preferences. In this modern age, they might wish to view things online or to interact with others in
	an electronic version of social networking. We can and should use technology in innovative ways to raise aspiration, to show young people what is available and to demonstrate how they can achieve their ambitions.

Iain Wright: Let me concede that the Minister has been the best Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning that I have ever seen in this Government. He has been exceptional in that regard.
	The Minister talked about online and electronic information, advice and guidance about careers. That has its place, but this is my point and the point of new clause 9: a central part of any successful careers advice system is the face-to-face personalised and tailored interaction between a young person and a careers professional, preferably not on a one-off basis on a wet Wednesday afternoon, as we discussed in Committee, but repeated time and again so that trust can be established between the student and the careers professional, and a relationship built up where the professional can know about the student’s wishes, skills, ambitions, potential and limitations, and accordingly challenge, motivate and provide good tailored advice about their prospects.
	In Committee, the Schools Minister did not provide huge reassurance on the matter. He seemed to believe that face-to-face information, advice and guidance was not appropriate for all students. I asked him whether he thought such face-to-face access should be the cream of careers advice, available only to a select few students, and he said in Committee that it would depend on the school, which might think it was appropriate for some students, but then again, might not. That is worrying.
	Steve Higginbotham, the president of the Institute of Career Guidance, said that as a result of the Government’s plans and the incompetence regarding the transition scheme and because face-to-face advice has not been prioritised,
	“The likely reality is that hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of young people will never get access to personalised impartial career guidance, having to rely on the national telephone helpline or website and school staff”.
	Young people deserve better than that. I believe very much in allowing the professional judgment of teachers and head teachers to flower, but more than anything else I want the potential of the young person to be nurtured. For a Department that states that it trusts the judgments of professionals, Ministers seem remarkably reluctant to allow careers professionals to meet pupils at the school.
	The purpose of new clause 9 is to ensure that that would occur. The clause would help to ensure that relevant and personalised advice could be provided for every single student, rather than just a select few in a school. The school governing body—the Minister will recall that I have always believed that school governors have a positive and largely untapped role to play in the provision of first-class careers advice—would have the responsibility to ensure that careers professionals had face-to-face meetings with pupils. It would make sure that, as my hon. Friends the Members for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and for Wigan mentioned and as the hon. Member for Wirral West alluded to, there was not a postcode lottery or even a school lottery for careers advice, with pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds being disadvantaged still further by a lack of resources to fund face-to-face services. If the Minister and the Front-Bench team are serious about wishing to help every child fulfil their potential—and I think they are—I cannot see how they would have a problem with new clause 9. I therefore hope that the Minister will accept it. I give notice that I wish to test the opinion of the House by pressing it to a vote.
	Finally, I hope that the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) did not take offence earlier when I commented from a sedentary position about flabby liberalism. I was speaking about his policy position, rather than any personal appearance. On careers advice, I think the Liberals are like Joe Bugner rather than Muhammad Ali or the late, great Sir Henry Cooper, whom we lost earlier this month. I wish they were more like Ali and Cooper, and it is disappointing that they have not been so in debate in Committee and in the House today.

Simon Hughes: Again, the hon. Gentleman would not want to mislead people. The scheme proposes that everyone who this year is in their first year of receiving EMA at the top rate—£30 a week—will next year receive £20 a week. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people, not 12,000. The figure he refers to relates to the additional agreement, which was never there before, that those with special needs, such as those on income support, those who have been carers and those who have been in care, will be entitled to a minimum of £1,200 a year. I welcome that. The Government will have to keep under review whether that is enough for that cohort of young people and whether the figure might have to be adjusted in years to come.
	New clause 9, which was tabled by the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) and his friends, makes an important point that was also raised by the hon. Members for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and for Wirral West (Esther McVey). I am in the process of finishing my report for the Government on the careers service and the implications for access to further and higher education, and I am very clear not only that there should be a careers service available for every secondary school child, but that it should include a personalised service. It is not enough that everyone should have access to a telephone service or an online service or be given a book. I know that the Minister understands that point and is sympathetic to it. I hope that we will arrive at the situation in which everyone knows that they will be able to engage with someone who knows about careers and can assist them. It should certainly be one session, but more may be needed.
	Those careers advisers also need to be professionally recognised. The six main groups that have provided careers guidance are getting their act together and hope to be together in one organisation this summer. When that is done, they can be recognised, which I think will give us the basis for a good service of general careers information, advice and guidance. I welcome that and hope that Ministers will be sympathetic to the fact that that service must be offered by recognised professionals.
	There is obviously a concern in the House, which the hon. Member for Wirral West expressed, about the transition from the current Connexions service, which was good in parts and less good in others, to the all-age careers service, which is generally welcome and could be very good when it is up and running. Ministers understand the need to ensure that a year’s worth of young people do not fall through the gap between the old and new services. We must ensure that resources and arrangements are in place to prevent that.
	I want to make one last pair of suggestions for Ministers to consider. I have been across the country talking with school students, and students in sixth-form colleges and universities, and some very unfortunate evidence has come out of that. Some young people, of course, say that their careers advice was excellent, but the majority say that they did not get good enough careers advice or work experience. This was a clear majority, probably about 80% whether on Merseyside, in Cornwall or anywhere else, and we really have to improve those things.
	At the end, I hope Ministers will accept that, in every sixth-form, college and school, somebody should have responsibility for the careers service and careers advice, and that another person should have responsibility for the access arrangements—for making sure that people are shown the life opportunities that will come to them after school or college.
	We need to build on where we are and to do much better. I hope that the Minister will be sympathetic to the intention behind this group of proposed changes, but, if we cannot agree to them tonight because we might not be at that stage just yet, I hope that we will have an opportunity to do so before the Bill becomes law. I know that Ministers are keen to get it right, and I welcome the fact that the Minister before us is determined to do so.

John Hayes: I will speak to Government amendments 36 and 37 and deal with the remarks made by hon. Members on the other amendments in the group.
	Let me first say a few words about EMA. The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) always speaks in a reasoned way. I appreciate that he brings expertise to this House because of his prior experience. I share his commitment, and that of the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), to fairness. It is important that we deliver a fair outcome. It is also right that we set out clearly our expectations of how the new bursary fund will operate, and we mean to do so.
	As the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) said, we are engaged in a consultation. I can give the commitment today that following the consultation we will publish short, focused guidance on the new system for schools, colleges and training providers. We certainly do not want a system that is not coherent, consistent or fair. As has been done previously in respect of EMA, we will publish details of the arrangements that we intend to make for provision of financial assistance under the new scheme. On 28 March, we announced additional transitional arrangements to help those who are part way through their studies. The hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) paid
	tribute to that. On whether conditions should be attached to receipt of the 16 to 19 version, we expect, subject to consultation, to set out in guidance that schools, colleges and training providers should consider doing just that.
	I hope that those comments will go some way towards assuring those who have had understandable doubts about this that we intend to do this in a proper, measured and considered way. In the past few months, they have told us that conditionality, which was a feature of EMA, was an important factor in encouraging positive attitudes to learning. I believe it is right that these conditions should be set locally, as they are now for EMA. As we discussed throughout the Committee proceedings, we are seeking to reduce, not increase, the regulatory burdens on schools and colleges. The administration of 16 to 19 bursaries should be at the discretion of individual schools and colleges, supported by guidance from the centre, giving head teachers and principals the power to make decisions that are in the best interests of students.
	Let me give some examples of that. Members of the House will know that in rural areas there are different pressures surrounding transport from those, typically, in urban areas. In other circumstances, depending on what people are studying, there may be particular pressures to do with the equipment that is required for people to fulfil their studies. There needs to be sufficient flexibility to take account of, and address, different needs, but that does not mean that coherence should not be established in what we say from the centre. I hope that that goes a considerable way down the road towards the destination of widespread agreement that is at the heart of all we do as a Government and I do as a Minister.
	The hon. Member for Scunthorpe spoke about enrichment activities. I thank him for the opportunity to discuss this important and valuable aspect of young people’s education. I know that he was a distinguished principal of John Leggott sixth form college before coming to this House and brings that understanding here. I also know, however, that he does not support the reductions that we have had to make to the funding for enrichment activities. This does not mean that we do not understand their significance or value. The context in which we debate these matters today, as we debate all our considerations on the funding and management of education, is one of financial pressure. The Government are in the business now of having to make tough decisions about value for money and priorities, and of ensuring that the money that is spent delivers the fairness that the hon. Member for Wigan articulated.
	Because we agree that such activities can be valuable for young people, we have protected funding for tutorials for all 16 to 18-year-olds. Our commitment to vulnerable groups is demonstrated by our increasing by £150 million to £750 million the amount of funding to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds and those who need additional support. We expect that additional funding to be used to provide the additional support that disadvantaged students need, including enrichment activities if they are appropriate.
	I would like to have spoken about the apprenticeship entitlement, but it is sufficient to say that in the evidence sessions, it was clear from the witnesses that the arrangements that prevailed under the previous Government were not widely agreed to be effective. I think it was Martin Doel of the Association of Colleges who said he
	never felt that those arrangements were really operable. I think that our changes will mean that we can deliver on our commitment.
	I will say no more about that, because I want to say a word about careers guidance, which has been spoken about a lot. It is a subject dear to my heart as it is vital. Let me make it clear that I fully appreciate the relationship between good advice and guidance and subsequent progress. Furthermore, it is fundamentally important for social mobility and social justice that that advice and guidance is available to people who would not get it by other means. As the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark suggested, such advice and guidance is usually available to more advantaged people through social networks or familiar understanding. That is not always the case for people with less wherewithal who are trying to navigate their way through the system. This is not about aspiration. Let us once and for all kill off the bourgeois, left assumption that working-class people do not aspire to the same things as their middle-class contemporaries. Their ambitions are the same; what they lack is the wherewithal. My mission is to provide that wherewithal, so let us discuss some of the detail.

Amendment made: 38,page57,line9, at end insert—
	‘(f) section [Charges at boarding Academies].’.—(Mr Gibb.)
	Schedule 14
	Amendment made: 39,page112,line24, at end insert—
	‘() in the opening words, for “subsections (4) and” substitute “subsection”;’.—(Mr  Gibb .)

Nick Gibb: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
	Let me begin by thanking all Members on both sides of the House who served on the Bill Committee. As with all the best Bill Committees, it was always good-humoured and good-natured, and it included thorough scrutiny of each of the Bill’s 79 clauses and 17 or 18 schedules. In barely a month we had 22 sittings, even more than the Committee considering the mammoth Bill that became the last Government’s Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009, which, with 270 clauses, was well over three times the size. We also reached the final clause with time left over to debate new clauses as well, which is rare for any Bill Committee. It is therefore only right and proper for me to pay tribute to the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), as well to officials in the two Departments and officials of the House.
	Having spent 13 years in opposition, I know from first-hand experience how demanding a Committee stage can be for Opposition spokesmen, so let me also thank
	the hon. Members for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) and for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) for the professional way in which they fulfilled their responsibilities.
	The Education Bill has four principal aims: to help schools improve behaviour in the classroom, to remove bureaucratic burdens from schools and, in particular, from teachers by restoring trust in professionals, to ensure that schools are properly accountable to parents and local communities for what they do, and to ensure that the resources that we have are distributed fairly and targeted towards those pupils that need them the most.

Andy Burnham: Thank you, Mr Speaker.
	The Secretary of State’s first Bill was rammed through with unseemly haste, under procedures normally reserved for counter-terrorism measures, when the odour in the rose garden was still pleasant and Labour leadership candidates were still on the hustings, so we can at least say that this Bill has had a more thorough airing. I therefore thank the members of the Public Bill Committee for their work on it, and I thank the Officials, Officers and other staff of the House who have enabled the Committee’s work to take place. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) and for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), who have done an excellent job.
	The schools Minister has been assiduous in his replies, and I thank him for that, but his courtesy has not extended to the production of the essential documents, such as the draft admissions code, that are needed to give this Bill the fullest possible scrutiny. That is highly regrettable—it is insulting, even, to Members of this House—and I trust that the same discourtesies will not be repeated towards Members of another place. Talking of discourtesies, it is a shame that the Secretary of State could not dignify us with his presence this evening. He made a cameo appearance earlier, but he obviously has something more important to do than be here to see his own Bill through. I do not know whether he has a good reason—perhaps he does—but we should have been able to expect him to be here.
	Like the Health and Social Care Bill, the Education Bill threatens a free-for-all in our public services. It is a reckless gamble with standards and with the life chances of our children, with no evidence to support it. That is why we will vote against it tonight. Our principal objection to it is based on the fact that it takes power away from parents and pupils and hands it back to providers and to the centre, in the form of the Secretary of State. That is the flaw at the heart of the Government’s vision for public service reform. If they give more freedom and
	autonomy to providers, be they general practitioners or hospitals in the health sector or head teachers and schools in the education sector, they have to balance that with a corresponding empowerment of the public—parent and patient guarantees—and more ability for service users to hold providers to account. That is what is completely absent from the Government’s vision: this is a provider-led reform with an accountability deficit.
	The health reforms have been paused, partly because of fears that the system being created lacks moderating checks and balances. Many people working in education, who will be watching these proceedings, have exactly the same fears about these schools reforms, but sadly the House, in its votes this evening, has failed to respond to them. This is a right-wing reform of our education system, a ripping up of the fabric and frameworks that have stood our services and our children in good stead for years.
	Tory Cabinet Ministers are now boasting about this radical right-wing agenda. Iain Duncan Smith has said:
	“We’ve got a lot—my welfare reforms, the education reforms…all of these are big, big Conservative-driven themes.”
	I believe he said that today. William Hague went as far as admitting that the Lib Dems were crucial—

Julie Hilling: Given the time, I shall speak very briefly about the Bill, which is bad in so many ways. The Government talk about giving power to parents and teachers, but at every turn they remove powers from parents and communities and give them to the Secretary of State. The Bill does not build, but destroys. It encourages schools to be islands rather than resources in the community that can bring agencies together for the benefit of children and young people. The Bill also misses opportunities. It is good that it provides for the anonymity of teachers, but why does it not extend that anonymity to other school staff, who are often more vulnerable than teachers to accusations?
	There are three other areas in which the Bill misses opportunities. First, by getting rid of the school support staff negotiating body it does a real disservice to 500,000 generally low-paid workers. That body has been working on job descriptions and job gradings for 100 strands of work within schools, from the work of classroom assistants to that of school bursars and caretakers. Its work was stopped last year when the Government pre-empted the Bill by saying that the body was going to be removed. I seriously hope that they will reconsider their decision and allow the body at least to complete its work, and support it in doing so.
	Secondly, my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and I tabled an amendment that would have given schools a duty to facilitate positive activities
	for young people. There have been some fantastic examples of youth work in schools, usually in partnership with youth services and other agencies, but cuts in youth services and central funding streams have made that work difficult. I hope that the Government will consider how they can support youth work, either through the Bill or elsewhere.
	Finally, the Government have missed a real opportunity to save lives. It is not often that any Government get the opportunity to do something simply, easily, cheaply and immediately that would save lives, but this Government have that opportunity. If they introduced emergency life skills into the national curriculum they could make a real difference. ELS is a set of actions that save lives, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation and dealing with choking and bleeding. Every year 150,000 people die in situations in which first aid could have made a difference. Each year in the UK 30,000 people have a cardiac arrest outside the hospital environment, of whom fewer than 10% survive. Children are often present at accidents and emergencies, and by learning emergency life skills they can be as effective as any adult in saving lives. If someone has a cardiac arrest in Seattle they have a great chance of surviving, because children there are taught ELS as part of their national curriculum. Indeed, people cannot graduate from school or pass their driving test unless they learn ELS. If any Member is going to have a cardiac arrest they should have it in Seattle, because they would rarely be more than 12 feet away from someone who could save their life. Why can we not have that situation in the UK? If we did, we could save lives. I hope that the Government will reconsider that and put ELS into the national curriculum.

John McDonnell: The Bill abolishes a number of bodies—the General Teaching Council for England, the Training and Development Agency for Schools, the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency and the Young People’s Learning Agency.
	In the past the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations were applied when bodies were abolished and staff were transferred from the
	public sector to the private sector. They would be protected, together with their conditions of work, the recognition of their trade union and their basic employment rights. Because that does not apply to transfers of staff within the public sector, the Cabinet Office introduced the Cabinet Office statement of practice—COSOP—which in the past has been included in legislation so that TUPE principles applied to staff as if they were being transferred out of the public sector. The previous Government stated that on the face of the Bill that that was the situation when the Learning and Skills Council was abolished. The present Government have done the same thing in the Localism Bill, but not in the Education Bill. As a result, the staff are feeling insecure about their future. That affects morale and recruitment and retention—

Justine Greening: Perhaps if I make a little more progress, it will help hon. Members to understand the Government’s position in a little more detail and where we are in the proposal’s development, which it is important to understand. It is also important to understand Parliament’s role in the process, which is the whole point of this debate.
	A number of issues need to be addressed in the policy substance of this proposal. Those issues will have to be discussed among all 27 member states. That is why we have committed to engage in the ongoing EU discussions on this proposal. It is important that the UK participates fully in the negotiations, so that we can seek solutions that meet the interests of the UK and the EU as a whole. Although the issues of subsidiarity and proportionality are fundamental, we need to be ready to engage fully in the negotiations that are starting in Brussels. We need to engage not only in Brussels, but with our fellow member states to ensure that we influence them.
	For example, member states will need to consider the implications of the proposal for companies operating across the UK, particularly if it were taken forward through enhanced co-operation. We should also seek to ensure that a common consolidated corporate tax base does not undermine UK competitiveness or create opportunities for tax avoidance.
	Such considerations will involve examining some of the specific issues raised in the European Scrutiny Committee’s helpful report, such as the potential implications for the tax treaties and the risk of creating additional administrative burdens on business. Of course, one of the European Commission’s arguments is that the proposal will reduce burdens and provide simplification, but, like the Committee, the Government simply do not accept that argument.
	I turn to some of the specific concerns that the Committee raised in its report. First, I will address the proposal’s legal base. Article 115 of the treaty on the
	functioning of the European Union provides for EU legislation that directly affects the single market. In strict legal terms, it is possible to make a case that that article is an acceptable legal base for a proposal such as that that we are discussing, but the Government have broader reservations. We do not believe that a common consolidated corporate tax base is necessary for the internal market to function effectively, and we do not accept the assumptions that appear to underpin the Commission’s proposal. At present, we are therefore not convinced that the proposal is consistent with either subsidiarity or proportionality. In this instance, we think it difficult to separate the two, because both centre on whether such an EU mechanism is necessary to achieve the objectives set out by the Commission.

Justine Greening: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that we can say no for ourselves, but the problem, as he is aware, is that under the treaty, a smaller group of nine or more member states—

Christopher Leslie: The Minister has essentially enunciated a continuation of the policy advocated by the previous Administration. In fact, this common consolidated corporation tax base proposal has been around for a decade or so. In that time there has not been a massive change in policy, which is interesting, because I had anticipated that, in her quasi-Thatcherite mode, the Minister would say, “No, no, no!” to this proposal—but she did not.
	As I said, it is interesting that the motion is quite carefully worded. It specifically mentions “reasoned opinion”, “subsidiarity and proportionality” and so forth, but if passed it would not actually instruct the House of Commons to reject the directive as drafted. I suspect—on this point I was thinking of intervening on the hon. Lady, but I thought I would let her finish—that it might be more to do with the Liberal Democrat position on this issue. [Interruption.] The Minister rolls her eyes, but there are no Lib Dems here so it is difficult to put them on the spot.
	Hon. Members will be interested to hear the Lib Dems' official policy on a common consolidated corporate tax base. In their 2009 document, they stated that they would “address the variability issue” on cross-border corporation tax
	“by developing a medium and long-term statement of business tax policy, covering a minimum two parliament timeframe. This statement would…identify areas for greater international co-operation on tax policy. A clear area for co-operation is in the movement towards a harmonised tax base in the EU, often referred to as a Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base”.
	So, there is a loud voice—muscular and visible, as we now know—in the coalition arguing vociferously in favour of a common consolidated corporate tax base. I say that for the benefit of the House, because it is important that hon. Members know the facts. Given that the motion was published only this morning on the Order Paper—hon. Members did not really have notice of exactly the Government’s proposition, which is quite ridiculous—and that all 298 pages of the supporting papers were published only yesterday, I am not surprised that many hon. Members have not yet woken up to the opinion being taken of the Government on this matter.

Christopher Leslie: Yes, I agree with the right hon. Gentleman on that. We need to begin entirely readdressing the accountability deficit. I know that this Parliament already tries valiantly to address it—in Scrutiny Committees and elsewhere—but this is a debate about serious proposals. The Treasury is often an intermediary these days when it comes to new regulations and policy changes. It is important that we should think about the design of our Government and our Parliament in tackling proposals as they come along.
	As I said, I am interested in the Government’s line. We will not take issue with them on this proposal this evening, but we want to watch where they go with it. All I am asking of the Minister is whether coalition policy is taking into account the Liberal Democrat official line.

Nigel Mills: It is a privilege to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), although I shall not follow his lead by addressing European law in forensic detail. In these debates, we run the risk of getting lost in the detail of legal technicalities and forgetting to look at why the whole idea before us is bad for Britain and bad for Europe. Although I understand why the Government have put forward this proposal, I want at the very least to try to improve it and to make the final agreed measure the least bad it can possibly be. More than that, however, I think we must explain why the whole idea is so bad for all European Union member states and try to persuade them to kill it off and not run with a slightly improved version.
	My hon. Friend set out some of the reasons why this is bad for Britain. There is great concern that it would lead to tax revenue disappearing from Britain and going to other member states. We should consider the three proposed allocation keys: the number of employees and the wage bill; the value of tangible assets, but not intangible assets except in some limited circumstances; and the level of sales. Those keys will greatly favour economies that have high employee-intensive and asset-intensive industries, and I am not at all sure that that is how we would describe our economy, or whether it
	would accord with our vision for our economy in the future. The amount of profit, and therefore tax revenue, could be skewed, with the extra sums going to the nations with high numbers of employees and high-value tangible assets. As a result of this measure, multinational groups would be able to allocate certain activities and thereby place their corporate tax bills in territories that would result in their getting a lower rate than we might want. We must be very careful, therefore.
	From my experience as a tax adviser for 13 years, I can say that what we want is choices. It would be a great start if we could choose whether or not to be in the regime, or if we could choose to be in, and then try to have a completely different allocation key if we can find one that gets us a lower bill. The draft directive allows that. The aim must be to get every possible chance to choose. If I can choose where to base and allocate certain activities, I can come up with some clever ideas on how to reduce my tax base. In these days of internet sales, where we recognise a sale to have been made is an interesting exercise. Is it where the server is based, for instance? It could be set anywhere we like, I think.
	For some, there is an attraction in such Europe-wide measures. If I were an American finance director I might think, “I have 27 EU subsidiaries, and sorting out all the tax returns and compliance issues is horribly complicated, but now I can just do one nice and simple tax return. Great!” In the US system however, there is a federal corporate tax, but also a load of different state systems. I do not think anyone would say its system is at all simple, or would choose to adopt that model.
	We should be looking to take away some of the tax barriers across Europe. Frankly, the EU has led to the creation of some unnecessary tax obstacles. The idea that the EU involves a tax simplifying arrangement is somewhat laughable. About seven years ago, we had to extend transfer pricing rules to apply between UK resident companies of the same group because we were concerned that the European Court would otherwise throw out the transfer pricing rules that only applied on cross-border transactions. That increased the compliance burden on almost every corporate tax group in the UK. Ideally, we would allow our large groups to have a consolidated tax filing in the UK of all their UK entities, and thus take away the need to keep separate records and make separate transactions. We cannot do that because we fear European law would strike it out for no particularly good reason, yet we can try to have this complex arrangement for the whole EU.
	We would think that the EU would be taking away withholding taxes, yet its directives allow withholding taxes on certain transactions between member states. If we are going to spend a lot of time and money looking to simplify tax across the EU, let us look to take away the barriers that are already there, and not create whole new levels of complexity we do not need. This whole agenda is a complete blind; this has to be seen as a drive towards a single European Union, a single federal state and a single tax system. If we want to be competitive, we are making exactly the right moves in reducing our tax rate, but there is more to a competitive tax system that attracts overseas investment than just the rate; there is the tax base, and the stability and simplicity of the system. If there is one message for the Government coming out of this, it is that we need to simplify our tax
	regime to make these ideas, which are superficially simple but which would not turn out to be so, seem less attractive.
	I took the time to look through the draft directive on a common consolidated corporate tax base and I could see a few things in it that will attract some multinational directors. Its level of tax depreciation or capital allowances allowed for fixed assets is somewhat higher than we are reducing ours to. As I recall it, the EU is allowing 25% on a reducing balance basis, rather than the 18% that our level is now down to. Various other things in the directive may also be found attractive. We should focus our energies on trying to simplify our tax system to keep our competitive advantage, which arises from some of the reliefs we offer. We should also try to take away the tax barriers around Europe and not create a whole new complex system. We should not waste loads of time and money and miss the big picture.

John Redwood: Tonight’s debate should be a vital one because, after all, it is about sovereignty; it is about power. The might of this House of Commons in its great years was based on one very simple proposition: that only a vote of the House of Commons could impose or remove a tax on the British people. It was that power which our predecessors fought for and achieved, and it was that power which was crucial to grant the supply to the Government, who could then choose how to spend it, on the advice and with the votes of the House of Commons.
	We have been assured and reassured by countless Ministers of the Crown since we joined the European Economic Community in the 1970s that taxation was always a matter for unanimity; that we would always have a veto over any tax matter; and that there was no question of the European Union interfering and choosing taxes for us or running our tax system. Under the previous Labour Government tax was said to be a defensible red line, which they always told us they had always protected. Under previous Conservative Governments, Ministers could rightly then say that it was always a matter entirely for the jurisdiction and decision of this House of Commons.
	Yet tonight, in this small and short debate, we are presented with a 102-page draft law which is a comprehensive new corporation tax system for the European Union, including the United Kingdom. Worse still, we have been warned in a friendly way by the Minister that if this country disagrees with it, a group of countries may go ahead under some other procedure and create it anyway, and they will then exert extraterritorial jurisdiction over the UK because they will try to bid our companies away from our system to their system. As my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) has just said, tax advisers and accountants will be able to play all sorts of games under this complicated system so that companies that have some activities in Britain could be tempted into the European Union opt-in system. That would mean that the British Treasury and British Ministers would no longer have jurisdiction over them; we would get back only what the sharing formula ballowed, which the European Union would be in charge of.
	I assume that it is because the Minister is worried about that eventuality that she has not come here with a straightforward proposal just to veto the whole thing.
	My advice to the Government is that this should be the issue we fight over. This proposal is so outrageous, it is such a comprehensive violation of subsidiarity, as they call it, and it is such a U-turn from the proposition that a member state has control over its own tax affairs that surely we should veto it. If we vetoed it and other countries still wanted to go ahead as a lesser group than the European Union, we should follow things through and say that it therefore does not apply to the United Kingdom and we will not operate it in respect of companies that are properly domiciled here and should be taxed here under our rules. We should set the rules for organisations and companies undertaking activity in Britain, making money in Britain and employing people in Britain. If we cannot do that, what is the point of this House of Commons? I think the Minister is in a stronger position than perhaps her officials and advisers have suggested.
	We have heard, I think rightly, from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) that the legal base is not correct. In order to justify all the statements that this is a matter for unanimity, it must come under that measure in the treaty that states that other proposals can be produced but that they require the unanimous consent of all member states. It must come under a unanimous base. Once it is a matter to be decided under a unanimous base, we can then save the European Union a lot of time, trouble and money because we can simply say that we do not wish to have a collective corporation tax system and that Britain is going to use her veto. For once, surely, the United Kingdom could have some influence over the agenda of the European Union and we could show that we mean it when we say that taxation is for national decision—that it is a matter for subsidiarity, in the EU’s language, or a matter of sovereignty, in my language.
	I would like to ask my ministerial friend what the point was of this House solemnly legislating to maintain, uphold or reaffirm the sovereignty of the British Parliament if we cannot even choose our own corporation tax regime. What is the point of our going along with the negotiations to try to ameliorate, improve or abate the severity of this draft law if we are doing so in the spirit that we will end up with a law of sorts anyway? We will then hear from the Minister that instead of it being something that we have vetoed, it is something we have taken the worst out to make it a bit more tolerable so that we can go along with it. It will not be necessary for the other member states who want the measure to use a special procedure to get it, and there will be no need for us to say to them that we refuse to go along with it or comply with it.

Steven Baker: As ever, my right hon. Friend makes his points with incredible force. Does he not agree if the European Union follows the policies of bail-outs and political interference with business all the time, we will keep seeing measures like this one again and again until we head towards a single centralised economic system of government?

John Redwood: I am not sure I believe that. We have heard from the Minister that they are a happy and united team and that she is proud of the work she has brought to us. I am saying that I would like her to improve the work and to go back and make that happy team one that can perhaps make us happier. The simple answer is veto—she should say, “No, this cannot work. It is a dreadful constitutional intrusion on a country that desperately needs its own economic recovery to accelerate, that needs lower tax rates and greater tax simplification and that needs to promote economic growth.” My right hon. Friend the Chancellor is beginning to do that, but I think more measures are needed to secure the deal and make sure it works.
	I am quite sure that this huge deal—the 102-page draft law—is not the way forward. My hon. Friend the Minister says that there is no proposal, but I regard a 102-page draft law as a very serious proposal. Experience has taught me never to underestimate the power and persuasion of the European Union when it wants to do something. I think that it is now on a great push to establish all the central powers it needs for the economic governance of a single-economy, single-country model,
	and that this is part of it along with the economic six-pack. My strong advice to my hon. Friend is that Britain can do better, Britain needs to say no and Britain needs to exempt herself from all this, as we are entitled to do, so that we keep a sovereign Parliament and a growing economy.

Jacob Rees-Mogg: My hon. Friend leads me away from the essential point, which is that the EU does not have any authority over direct taxation, whether it is approximating it or not, so the approximation is irrelevant in relation to direct taxation because the treaties do not provide for that. If the treaties do not provide for it, then the EU cannot provide for enhanced co-operation
	without a specific treaty amendment, which would of course be a separate veto-able activity under the treaties as they exist.
	We often complain about European law, and I do not like the fact that laws made by this Parliament can be overturned by the European Court, but as that is the world in which we live, when European law is on our side we ought to use it. So I reiterate my plea to the Minister in the European Councils to say that we are uncertain of the legal base and that we would like a clear legal judgment from the European Court of Justice before we proceed with further negotiations.
	Now there is also a fall-back position, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) said. If the European Court of Justice were, as a federalising court, to invent a legal base, we could then come back to the point of subsidiarity, where this debate is so relevant and important. We are putting the argument to Europe and saying, “You have put these fine protections into the treaties. You have used these grand-sounding words—not as clear as the 10th amendment to the United States constitution, but none the less words that are supposed to protect the rights of sovereign member states. Let’s now see if you mean it. Let’s now see if you, the Commission, will accept the argument for subsidiarity, and if you won’t, whether the court will back it up and whether the proposals will fall on that basis.”
	If all this fails, then I accept the Minister’s position. I must confess that it is a reassurance to those of us on the Eurosceptic wing of the party that it is the Minister who will be conducting the negotiations, because at least we know that it is not, as some on the Opposition Benches would have said, a woolly Liberal negotiating. It is somebody who wields a handbag in as fine a way as the great lady—[Interruption.]—the blessed lady, so we have confidence that the Government’s negotiations will be tough.
	It is fair enough to go through a process, if that is where we end up, but ultimately the response must be no, not least because tax competition is a thoroughly healthy thing.

Justine Greening: With the leave of the House, I would like to sum up the debate. We have had a full and constructive discussion on this proposal, which is, as we have heard, an important one. I want to close by reiterating a few key points, but also by doing my best to respond to the comments that have been made by Members—I was about to say across the House, but that is obviously not the case, given that the Opposition spokesman turned up with very few other people from his party.
	First, I should address a couple of the points that the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) made about the work that we do as a country with other member states. I can assure him that the UK has, for example, double tax treaties in place with all EU member states that set out mechanisms for allocating taxing rights to prevent the double taxation of companies, and structures for reaching agreement on double taxation relief and the exchange of information. He will be aware that there is also a mutual agreement procedure framework for resolving cross-border disputes about tax, including transfer pricing. It is because such mechanisms and frameworks are in place that we believe that the proposed approach is necessary.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about the views that we have heard from business. We have heard a range of views, and discussions between business and Government are ongoing. In general, it is fair to say that business has not been actively calling for this proposal. It is also fair to say that some businesses have welcomed it—in particular, the prospect of allowing for cross-border loss consolidation. However, some companies are stressing that their support depends on the optional nature of the proposal. An awful lot of others, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills), have expressed concerns about the potential compliance and administrative costs, which are likely to be large for many companies, and the lack of certainty about how many aspects of the system would work—a concern that is shared by the Government.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) rightly raised the veto, and I want to provide absolute reassurance to all Members that we
	will not agree to any proposal that might threaten our Government’s ability to shape the UK’s tax policy. We are prepared to use our veto.
	As my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) pointed out, subsidiarity is the basis of one of the arguments that we can make, but that is not the only argument we can make. We should challenge the substance of the proposal, as well as raising our objections to the fundamental principles underlying it. That is precisely what we are doing. I emphasise to the House that we should continue to challenge the substance of the proposals as they develop, even if we do not necessarily want to be part of them.
	I disagree slightly with my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), because I think it does matter to us what the proposals are in which a smaller group of nations may participate. It is in our interests to understand what they are and whether they may have any direct or indirect impact on us as a member state. That is one reason why we want to be engaged in the discussions as they unfold. We also want to engage, because other member states are keen, as we are, to have their say on this matter. I do not accept that member states have reached a final position. The parliamentary debates and the development of those views are ongoing.

William Cash: Will the Minister be kind enough to be smart enough to make it clear that we will not do anything that the Liberal Democrats had in their manifesto? I have a suspicion bordering on certainty that the wording in the coalition agreement is taken straight from their manifesto commitments.

Justine Greening: We are introducing a series of measure that will, over time, tackle our underlying structural deficit. My right hon. Friend makes the point that in the meantime we need to borrow to pay off the structural deficit, which the country will continue to have until we have been through the process of fiscal consolidation. Until our nation’s finances are in balance, we face a challenge, because debt interest payments will continue to increase. If we had not taken the action that we are taking, we would have the added problem that the rate of interest on that debt would also increase. It is important that we get a grip on the debt interest rate that we are paying, that we tackle the problem now and that we do not leave the problem of debt and the fiscal deficit to future generations. We need to get into a position in which the debt is affordable, because it is currently squeezing the availability of money to spend on the public services on which we all depend. It is critical that we continue with that plan.
	Angel Gurría, the secretary-general of the OECD has urged our country to “stay the course”, which is precisely what we will do. Our plan has been praised by the international community and welcomed by the financial markets. As I have said, that will hopefully enable us to keep those interest rates lower for longer. Both the International Monetary Fund and the OECD went from issuing warnings and cautions to the UK regarding economic management under the previous Government to calling this Government’s measures essential and courageous. This Government’s decisive action has therefore taken Britain out of the financial danger zone, and the crucial first step in that process was restoring the credibility of our fiscal policy by replacing the fiscal framework. The charter sets out the new framework before Parliament and for the public.
	Perhaps I should remind the House why the Government set up the Office for Budget Responsibility. The previous Government’s forecasts for economic growth over the past 10 years were, on average, out by £13 billion, and their forecasts of the budget deficit three years ahead were, on average, out by £40 billion. Those forecasting errors were almost always in the wrong direction. In fact, all the previous Government’s forecasts for borrowing for more than two years ahead since Budget 2000 underestimated the eventual figure. It is vital for credibility and confidence that the forecasts for the economy and public finances are produced independently, which is why we established the OBR.
	In June 2010, the interim OBR produced an independent assessment of the economy and public finances ahead of the emergency Budget. Then at the Budget, the OBR produced a revised forecast on the basis of the consolidation measures announced by the Government. In November, the OBR produced its economic and fiscal outlook under the leadership of Robert Chote, whose appointment last year was scrutinised and confirmed by the Treasury Committee.
	We have moved the OBR on to a permanent status that is underpinned by primary legislation. The 2011 Act establishes in statute the provisions necessary to secure the OBR’s independence, and it received Royal Assent on 22 March. The permanent budget responsibility committee led on the production of the OBR’s March economic and fiscal outlook, which was published alongside the Budget 2011.
	The origin of the charter lies in the 2011 Act, which requires the Government to prepare a charter relating
	to fiscal policy and the management of the national debt, just as with the previous code for fiscal stability. However, the 2011 Act enhances the requirements for the charter compared with the code, because it provides that the charter must formally set out the Government’s fiscal objectives and mandate. The charter must in addition specify the minimum contents of the Budget report. The 2011 Act states that the charter may include guidance to the OBR on how it should perform its duties. Finally, the 2011 Act requires the Government to lay the charter before Parliament. The charter fulfils all those requirements, consistent with the 2011 Act and the remit of the OBR.
	The first part of the charter covers the Government’s fiscal framework. It sets out that the Government’s two fiscal objectives are first to ensure sustainable public finances that support confidence in the economy, promote intergenerational fairness and ensure the effectiveness of the wider Government policy, and secondly to support and improve the effectiveness of monetary policy in stabilising economic fluctuations.
	As we have heard, the Government’s fiscal policy mandate is a forward-looking target to achieve cyclically adjusted current balance by the end of the rolling five-year forecast period. At this time of rapidly rising debt, that mandate is supplemented by a target for public sector net debt as a percentage of GDP to be falling by a fixed date of 2015-16. That will ensure that the public finances are restored to a sustainable path.
	Crucially, the charter cannot simply be ripped up and rewritten whenever is convenient for a Government. Instead, if the Treasury wishes to alter the mandate, it must follow the formal process set out in primary legislation and return to the House for approval, which enhances the Government’s accountability to the House for their fiscal targets. The charter reiterates the Government’s intention also to adopt as the official forecast the OBR’s economic and fiscal forecast, and if the Treasury wishes to disagree with the OBR’s forecast, it will have to explain why to Parliament. Finally, the charter sets out the Government’s debt management objective and how they will set and report on their financing remit. The charter covers each element of the Government’s fiscal policy framework in a statutory document that the House has the ability to approve, enhancing the Government’s accountability for their fiscal policy.
	I turn now to the second part of the charter. It is an important part of the charter that provides guidance to the OBR on its role and duties. The OBR’s main duty, as set out in the 2011 Act, is to examine and report on the sustainability of the public finances. The OBR has complete discretion over how it carries out its statutory duties, and the 2011 Act makes it clear that in all its work the OBR must be objective, transparent and impartial. As part of this independence, the OBR has the freedom to decide the methodology that it uses, the forecast judgments that it takes, the contents of its documents and its work programme for future research and analysis. This independence is delivered through the 2011 Act and therefore protected in primary legislation.
	The purpose of this part of the charter is to set out extra detail on the OBR’s statutory responsibilities within the scope of the legislation. The charter requires the
	OBR to produce forecasts that cover at least five financial years, that provide sufficient information to allow the Government to use them as a basis for policy decision and that include all the Government’s announced policy decisions. The OBR must also set out the key assumptions that underpin its forecasts. In fact, it has already published far more detail in its assumptions and judgments than previous Budget and pre-Budget reports. The 2011 Act ensures that this will continue in future publications, while the charter provides further detail on the set of economic variables and fiscal aggregates that the forecasts should include.
	Of course, at this time of heightened uncertainty, the charter also sets out that the OBR must be clear about the risks that it has factored into its forecasts. The OBR forecasts result in an assessment whether the Government are on track to meet their fiscal mandate, and the charter also sets out that the OBR independently scrutinises and certifies all the policy costings that feed into its fiscal and economic forecasts. Importantly, the 2011 Act ensures that the OBR has a right of access to all Government information it requires to deliver its remit.
	As well as medium-term forecasts, the OBR will look to the longer term. As we have heard, the OBR has a duty to report on the sustainability of the public finances. It will therefore produce an annual fiscal sustainability report that will include long-term projections of the public finances covering the next 50 years. The first report is due out on 13 July. The charter sets out that as well as those projections, the report will include an assessment of the public sector balance sheet. The OBR will also analyse its forecasting performance, drawing lessons for future forecasts from the inevitable differences between its forecasts and out-turn data.
	Finally, the charter provides guidance on a number of administrative questions on the timing of interaction between the Treasury and the OBR. These are necessary to ensure that the complex Budget process runs smoothly while preserving the OBR’s freedom to act independently. There is also a memorandum of understanding agreed between Robert Chote, as chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, and other Departments to support their working arrangements. The charter restates and reinforces the independence of the OBR, and none of the guidance undermines its impartiality or objectivity.
	This charter lies at the heart of our reformed fiscal framework. It strengthens institutional arrangements, reinforces the independence of the OBR and restores credibility and confidence to the public finance forecasts.

Kerry McCarthy: I will bypass the first eight minutes of the Minister’s speech, in which she reiterated the usual mantra about everything being Labour’s fault—she usually resorts to that when questioned about the Government’s policy, but today she started her speech with it—and instead focus on the charter.
	The Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act 2011 was passed with consensus, at least on the principle of setting up the Office for Budget Responsibility and introducing the changes to the national audit process that the previous Government had already floated and that we would have implemented had we been re-elected in 2010. There was consensus on the principle, if not all the details that we discussed in Committee. We welcome
	the fact that the House is debating the charter in Government time, as we received assurances in the Public Bill Committee that it would do so. Indeed, that formed a central part of our debates on the Bill and it is a central facet of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s functioning and relationship with the Government.
	However, I note that the Government have on previous occasions attempted to get this motion through on the nod at the end of the day’s business. Only after efforts made by the Labour Opposition to secure a debate do we now have the opportunity to talk about the charter, which rather goes against the spirit of the reassurances that were given in Committee. Indeed, I questioned the Minister repeatedly in Committee about what was meant by the phrase “laid before Parliament” and whether such a promise would mean—not just on this occasion, but on future occasions—a proper debate on the Floor of the House or the measure being put through on the nod. However, at least we are here now, with the opportunity to discuss the issue.
	Debates on the Bill in Committee were, as I pointed out at the time, slightly hampered by the fact that we could discuss only the draft charter. I repeat my observation that it would have been better for the Committee—and for the House on Report when we approved the Bill—to have a finalised form of the charter for consideration. I note, however, that the final version laid before Parliament has not changed substantially, which is somewhat unfortunate, as it has not been improved as much as we had either been led to believe in Committee or had hoped for.
	Chapter 1 of the charter refers to section 6(2) of the 2010 Act and confirms that
	“the Charter may not make provision about the methods by which the OBR is to perform its duty,”
	which is an additional provision. That is important and crucial to the OBR’s independence. However, we pressed for the final version of the 2010 Act or the charter to guarantee complete discretion on what the OBR can consider, as well as how. Regrettably, as I shall set out later, that has not been included. Chapter 2 has not been changed substantially, although we welcome the inclusion of other Departments in the memorandum of understanding with Mr Robert Chote, on behalf of the OBR, and the Treasury, which recognises that the work of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions in particular is similarly pivotal to responsible fiscal policy and sustainable public finances.
	Given the importance of the memorandum to the transparency, objectivity and impartiality of the OBR, it is only right that the House should consider it. We therefore welcome the Treasury’s publication of the memorandum. The document refers to the forecast liaison group. Given the Government’s professed commitment to guaranteeing the transparency and independence of the OBR, will the Minister confirm that the Treasury will publish the minutes of the group meetings? If a dispute is escalated to the chair of the OBR or the permanent secretaries, will a Minister report to the House on the cause of the dispute and how they intend to solve it? Finally on the memorandum, it states:
	“Analysis of the direct impact of Government policies on the public finances will be provided to the OBR for independent scrutiny which will state whether the OBR agrees or disagrees with the Government’s costings”.
	Such analysis is one of the fundamental roles of the OBR, yet neither the memorandum nor the charter explains the consequences of the OBR’s assessment contradicting the Government’s own report. I will come later to the worrying implications if the Treasury were to disregard the OBR’s verdict.
	We also discussed in the Public Bill Committee the possibility of duplication and inconsistencies in OBR and Bank of England forecasts. Neither the charter nor the memorandum addresses that, and the Minister has previously advised that it would be for the two organisations to formalise their relationship in this respect. Perhaps she could update us on any discussions that the Treasury has had with the two organisations on their roles, and indeed on how the Chancellor intends to proceed in the event of a disagreement between the two.

Kerry McCarthy: The Bank of England’s forecasts have not always been as accurate as one might have hoped, but that proves my point: there could well be conflict between the Bank’s forecasts and the OBR’s forecasts. It is therefore right to ask what the Government would do in such circumstances. Would such a disagreement discredit the Bank of England’s forecasts? Will the OBR be seen as the ultimate arbiter on such matters, or will the Government be able to pick and choose whichever forecast suits their purposes?
	Chapter 3 of the charter and the Government’s objectives for fiscal policy are obviously at the core of the document. Some of the provisions in the charter might not be entirely necessary, however. For example, it places the Treasury under a duty to prepare a Budget report for each financial year, which one would hope would happen without it being told to do so. We acknowledge, however, that including the Government’s fiscal mandate in the charter and consequently requiring any modifications to be laid before the House is a welcome step. We hope that it will enhance Government accountability, although that should not be taken as an endorsement of the Government’s economic policy or of their fiscal policy objectives.
	Regrettably, given that economic growth has flat-lined under this Government and that forecasts have repeatedly had to be downgraded, it remains to be seen whether the Government are meeting their stated objectives—particularly that of supporting confidence in the economy. Nevertheless, we support the idea of working towards maintaining confidence in the economy. The charter rightly acknowledges that achieving that must be the responsibility of the Government and not of the OBR.
	The second objective, that of promoting inter-generational fairness, is much more contentious, and it has been challenged here and in the other place. It is not at all clear from the document what the Government mean by the term, although from the Minister’s comments tonight and on previous occasions, I assume that it refers to passing debt from one generation to another, rather than to passing on wealth, advantage and opportunity from one generation to another. If that is indeed the case, and the objective refers simply to inherited debt, it would appear that the Government
	under this Chancellor’s leadership have an exceptionally narrow conception of fairness which does not chime with most people’s understanding of the world.
	We should not be surprised by that, however, given the Government’s record on fairness to date. A Government who choose to take £7 billion of much-needed support from children in their first Budget and comprehensive spending review—three times the amount that they thought appropriate for bankers to pay—who choose to target women for spending cuts, who choose to penalise people on lower incomes, and who choose the regressive measure of increasing VAT can hardly be considered fair.
	Earlier today, many of us met constituents supporting the Hardest Hit campaign for people with severe disabilities and chronic illnesses, and I would ask the Government to explain to them how making people with disabilities and chronic illnesses pay the price for the financial crisis is fair. One of the constituents I met today is registered blind and has a guide dog, but she has been told that she is not eligible for the higher rate of disability living allowance. She used to work for a bank, and she wants to know why she is paying a bigger price for the financial crisis than her former bosses in that industry.

Kerry McCarthy: That certainly seems to be the suggestion. For some, it seems that they should be thankful as they do not realise how well off they are. The Minister has come close to saying that they have “never had it so good” under this coalition Government.
	We talked in Committee about the Child Poverty Act 2010, and the Government have since published the child poverty strategy. We pressed for a wider remit for the Office for Budget Responsibility to include scrutinising the Government’s progress under the Act. Although the Government rejected our amendment in Committee, I hope that the Office for Budget Responsibility will consider the proposals again in due course, as tackling child poverty is a crucial element of inter-generational fairness. It is disappointing that the Government do not seem to recognise that. I hope that the OBR will be afforded the necessary discretion to include this aspect in defining its role.
	It is highly disputable whether the Government have any mandate from the country for their fiscal policy, especially given that the Deputy Prime Minister led his party into the general election on an entirely different approach. Although setting out fiscal objectives has its advantages, it is clear that the Government are bringing in their targets far too early and cutting spending far too fast, as is demonstrated in the forecast that they will need to borrow £46 billion more than was planned last year because of their failure to promote economic growth successfully. That should prove to the Government that their fiscal mandate is not appropriate to the current economic climate and that a different approach is needed to secure the economy on a sustainable footing. That explains why it is key for the OBR to make wider reference to still fundamentally important economic determinants such as employment and growth.
	Ensuring a responsible fiscal policy is clearly beyond the OBR’s remit; instead, it is this House’s responsibility to try to make the Government take heed of its advice. For that reason, the charter’s assertion that the Government
	“retains the right to disagree with the OBR’s forecasts”
	is a serious concern, especially when reliable forecasts will be so crucial to the forward-looking targets. The Government have made a great song and dance about how the OBR will enhance the credibility of fiscal forecasting because of its independence from the Treasury, and the charter itself states:
	“The OBR is designed to address past weaknesses in the credibility of economic and fiscal forecasting and, consequently, fiscal policy”.
	However, enabling the Treasury to disregard independent official forecasts would make a mockery of the fundamental purpose of the OBR. It would also lead to dangerous uncertainty about which official forecasts we can and cannot believe, and which should inform fiscal policy. That is relevant to a point raised earlier by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood). I urge the Minister to clarify the status of the OBR and its forecasts.
	According to chapter 4 of the charter, the role of the OBR is to
	“examine and report on the sustainability of the public finances.”
	During the passage of the Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act, a number of attempts were made to secure a broad definition of sustainability, and to persuade the Government to acknowledge that it was not enough to focus on the deficit in an insular way while ignoring the impact on economic growth, employment, inflation, and other factors that are central to sustainable finances and responsible fiscal policy.
	Although the Government rejected our amendment which sought to guarantee a multi-dimensional approach to sustainability, arguing that the OBR should be able to define the concept, the Minister reassured the Public Bill Committee that she intended
	“to amend the charter to require the OBR to set out how it will approach sustainability in each of its reports.”––[Official Report, Budget Responsibility and National Audit Public Bill Committee, 1 March 2011; c. 48.]
	We therefore welcome the addition of paragraph 4.7 in the final charter, which confirms that
	“The OBR will consider a wide range of factors and dimensions relating to the sustainability of the public finances and will be transparent in its approach. More generally, in each report published under its main duty, the OBR will explain the factors taken into account when preparing the report, including the main assumptions and risks.”
	That reflects many of the concerns raised in both Houses. The reference to risks is important, given that the Government appear to be blinkered when it comes to the risks that are inherent in their deficit reduction plan.
	We are also pleased that chapter 4 refers to projections of GDP, inflation and the labour market. However, the absence of any complementary references in chapter 3 to the Government’s role, or indeed the Act, remains highly disconcerting. It suggests that the Government do not consider such fundamental considerations to be part of their role. I assure the Minister that promoting employment and growth are part of the Government’s responsibilities. Perhaps, in time, the OBR will help them to understand that. More positively, we welcome the inclusion of paragraph 4.13, which confirms the Office’s access to Government information, and the omission of the definitions of “objectively”, “transparently” and “impartiality”, which are terms that the OBR is best placed to define.
	We are slightly concerned about the inclusion of paragraph 4.12, which is an additional provision and which states:
	“The OBR should not provide normative commentary on the particular merits of Government policies.”
	There is a fine line between giving an impartial and informed assessment of the effectiveness of Government policies in achieving the declared objectives, and being
	seen to pass judgment on their merits. How does the Minister think that such a provision will be policed, and who will be the arbiter of whether the OBR has overstepped the mark?
	There is no reference in the charter or the memorandum to the funding of the OBR, which we argued in Committee was critical to its independence, but the charter does refer to the office’s discretion in regard to the timing of its publications, although that seems to be weakened by the requirement for
	“a regular and predictable timetable”.
	The fact that there have already been doubts about whether reports have been published in time for Prime Minister’s Question Time reinforces the need not only to ensure that the wording of the charter is sufficient but, more important, to ensure that it is followed in both the letter and the spirit.
	Our key reservation is that neither the Act nor the charter includes any means of ensuring enforceability. I have already mentioned the get-out clause that allows the Chancellor to ignore the OBR’s reports, but there is also no indication of the consequences of the Chancellor’s failing to meet his obligations under the charter. Will the Minister commit the Chancellor to reporting to Parliament following OBR publications? Most important, will she commit the Treasury to listening and to responding to OBR reports in its actions as well as its words?
	It is not enough for the Office for Budget Responsibility to tell us whether the Chancellor is acting responsibly—we know that he is not—and it is certainly not responsible to disregard its advice or forecasts, but neither the OBR nor the charter can do anything about that. Only the Chancellor can, and he must realise that a charter that proclaims the credibility of economic forecasting does not remedy the damage caused by the Government’s policies, and does not automatically translate into credible policy.

John Redwood: Like all those who have participated in this debate, I welcome the four principal aims identified in chapter 3 of this document. It is exactly right when it says that we need to
	“ensure sustainable public finances that support confidence in the economy”.
	We see all too many examples within Europe of what happens to countries that lose the confidence of world markets and the world’s bank managers. We see that far from being able to sustain high and rising public spending, such countries end up with far worse cuts that can be deeply damaging to their public services and social fabric. The Greeks seem to be getting into ever bigger difficulties the more money that is lent to the country on soft terms and the more that their Government fight to contain the deficit. We want to avoid getting into that vicious circle in which a Government raise taxes and cut spending, and the deficit grows because the economy plunges again and the revenues dry up even more. I think that hon. Members on both sides of the House now agree that it is most important that we undertake the work to ensure sustainable public finances.
	When I listen to the debate in this House, I sometimes feel that very few people have read the numbers in the Red Book. The Government’s pathway is to borrow more than £480 billion extra over the five years for which they are planning. That is more than the total state debt 10 years ago; it is a massive sum. Some people think that we are going to be paying off the debt or paying off the deficit, but we are not.
	This Government have, for understandable reasons, decided that they need to increase current public spending in each of the five years of this Parliament so that the impact of their decisions on public services can be gentle—I hope that in many cases it will not be felt in any bad way. As a result of that understandable decision, this massive borrowing has to be undertaken and the public debt will be so much greater at the end of the period. That makes it very important that we stick to the pathway of getting the deficit down, so that each year we borrow a bit less extra than the year before. That is the aim of the strategy. Some people seem to describe it in rather different and more draconian or alarmist ways, but the Government are simply trying to cut the rate of increase in the debt. If all goes well over five years, we will still end up making a far bigger increase in the debt than the total state debt just 10 years ago.
	I am delighted that the second aim given in this document is to
	“support and improve the effectiveness of monetary policy in stabilising economic fluctuations.”
	It is my view that the boom and bust were primarily created by a very badly managed monetary policy over the previous seven to eight years. We had the boom phase, when money was too easy, interest rates were too low and credit expanded too rapidly. Even worse, we had the bust phase, when the market was cleared of liquid funds, when interest rates were too high, and when the then Government were far too tight and jeopardised the financial system itself by pursuing a ridiculously tight money policy at the very point when it was obvious that banks were at risk and the system was in danger of collapse.

John Redwood: I am coming to the growth forecasts, if the hon. Gentleman will be patient. The Bank’s inflation forecasts might perhaps have helped to mislead the previous Government as well as the present one. Those forecasts assumed that we would be somewhere around 2% when of course we have reached 5% or more on the retail prices index and 4.4% on the consumer prices index. Today, we have had another revision to the inflation forecasts from the Bank of England saying that there might be more inflationary pain to come over the summer of this year before we start to see progress back to somewhere near the 2% target.
	I wish the Office for Budget Responsibility every success and hope that it will be more successful in its forecasts than the Bank of England has been in recent years. Today, the Bank had to announce not only an upward revision to this year’s inflation but a downward revision to this year’s growth. The OBR has already had to revise down its near-term year’s growth forecast in March of this year compared with its autumn forecast last year.
	My worry about the current forecasts is that the assumption that we are going to have three years of above-trend growth over the balance of this Parliament after next year could be optimistic if the world economic slow-down, which is likely next year, continues for any length of time. If the euro crisis gets worse and creates more financial and economic turmoil among our major
	industrial trading partners on the continent or if there are unforeseen problems with the rate of slow-down in the emerging market economies, which are currently applying tough monetary medicine to try to curb their inflation, it could be that much more difficult to hit those Budget targets. That is all important, because we have as a third aim the laudable idea of a forward-looking target to get the current balance or deficit down and to get a better balance between revenues and expenditure.
	I have explained that the five-year strategy assumes a very substantial cash increase in total public spending—around £94 billion from memory—and higher public spending on current account in the last year, compared with Labour’s last year, over this five-year Parliament. The way in which the deficit comes down in the official forecasts is mainly through a big increase in tax revenue. That big increase partly reflects the higher VAT rate and other higher tax rates that have already been imposed, but it mainly reflects the very good growth prospect in which we have three years of well-above-trend growth in the last three years of the period, accelerating from now onwards to that good performance. If there is any disappointment or need for downward revision by the OBR, that is going to throw out the tax revenues and we will therefore be faced with a bigger deficit that will require handling. We hear much debate in the House and in the media about whether the Government are trying to reduce the deficit too quickly, but the House should understand that there are risks the other way as well. If growth and tax revenue do not come through at the scale anticipated, we will be faced with rather more invidious issues to resolve about how to get the deficit down without that great super-boost from the revenue.
	The objective for debt management is to minimise over the long term the cost of meeting the Government’s financing needs, taking into account risk. This is exactly the point I am trying to stress in this short debate. So far, the markets like the Government’s strong stance. They are pleased that the Government have regarded deficit reduction as the No. 1 thing they have to do and they are pleased with the OBR’s independent forecast showing that the rate of increase in debt drops off quite nicely over the five-year period. However, they will not be pleased if there is major slippage or if the OBR has been too optimistic, so it is most important that we have the right people in the OBR, that it has good fortune with its forecasts and that it has taken into account the possibility, for example, of a deterioration in the international background, which could have an impact.
	In conclusion, I welcome the aims but I hope that the Treasury will consider the following important points. First, we must understand that just because a body is independent, that does not mean it gets things right. The Treasury will have to operate its own scepticism about the forecasts. If the OBR were too optimistic, it would be wise of the Treasury, at least privately, to have done some work on what might happen if the forecasts were too optimistic. One should not always assume that the OBR forecast is the worst case and that life is likely to be better. The Treasury should be very careful about that.
	Secondly, the Treasury should do some contingency planning in case the world economy is worse than anticipated and has an impact on growth rates. Thirdly,
	it should take the opportunity that will be presented by the new regime for controlling the banks, which will be introduced when many powers are passed to the Bank of England, to say that the Treasury and the Chancellor must have a role in all that because it was definitely the regulation of banks and the bad conduct in monetary policy that gave us the huge pain of the past six or seven years. We probably need more intervention from the Treasury and more accountability to the Treasury to try and get the system to work in the future.
	The Opposition love to say that the crisis was a global crisis and that therefore one should not blame any particular part of the UK governing establishment. I do not take that view. It was a largely western crisis and there were some advanced economies that were not affected by it. Australia had a particularly good period, China had a pretty good period, and India sailed right through without any problems. There were small and big economies that were not affected by the world crisis, even though global activity was hit, because American, British, Spanish and Irish activity was hit in a very predictable way.
	It was a rather limited number of countries that had gross mismanagement of their money supply and their banking systems. As the election is well behind us we should, in a non-partisan spirit, analyse what went wrong, admit that things went wrong in Britain, and make sure that the new architecture, of which the charter is just part, functions much better than the old architecture. That means questioning the assumption that independent people always get it right. It means understanding the ultimate accountability of the senior elected officials, and it means understanding that sometimes we need to be more pessimistic, at least in our private forecasts, so that we do not discover that our plans do not work.

Chris Ruane: Great changes have been introduced in the back to work agenda over the past year and many more will shortly follow. I believe that many of this Government’s decisions have been taken in haste and without a proper assessment of what does and does not work in the back to work agenda.
	I have been involved in the back to work agenda in my constituency for the past nine years. In 2002 I noticed that 50% of the unemployed people in my county, Denbighshire, lived in just two of the 34 wards: the west ward of Rhyl, a traditional seaside ward with many houses in multiple occupation, and Rhyl South West, a ward with a large council estate. Indeed, that is the council estate on which I grew up and spent 26 years of my life.
	In 2007, after I had convened a back to work agenda in my constituency, we heard that the Labour Government were introducing a national pilot scheme to get people back to work. It was called the city strategy. Along with Gareth Matthews of Working Links, I lobbied Work and Pensions Ministers to include Rhyl in the pilot. Rhyl was not a city—only 27,000 people lived in it—but it did have city-type unemployment problems on a small scale, as thousands of unemployed people had fled the inner cities of Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham and come to such seaside towns. We have concentrated areas of deprivation and unemployment. I asked if Rhyl could be the pilot for the unemployment initiatives in seaside towns, and my wishes were granted, with Rhyl becoming one of just 15 areas accepted into the city strategy.
	Since 2007 Rhyl City Strategy has gone from strength to strength. It administered one of the most successful future jobs funds in Wales, putting 450 long-term unemployed people back to work, and it won a bid to become a national pilot for the fit for work scheme.
	Rhyl City Strategy is supported by a consortium of more than 180 people from 70 different organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors, and there is a management board of 25 organisations that deals with the nitty-gritty of putting people back to work. Those two parts of the organisation meet four times a year, and the consortium now meets to deal with different themes relating to the back to work agenda. Best practice is swapped, initiatives are shared and support is given. Co-operation is maximised and duplication and ignorance are minimised. It is one of the most successful organisations that I have been involved with in the past 25 years of my public life.
	There are a number of reasons for that success. The board is headed by the private sector: the chair is Barry Mellor, the north Wales manager of Arriva buses. The organisation views the issues from the perspective of the employer as well as the employee. Rhyl City Strategy is a community interest company, which gives it tremendous flexibility, and decisions do not have to be referred back for months of county council committee meetings.
	There is a good blend of the public, private and voluntary sectors. As the work has been going on for almost 10 years, there are bonds of trust and co-operation between and within all three sectors, each reinforcing the other and often coming together informally, outside set meetings, to help in developing initiatives. There is good feedback from the overseeing bodies at the Department for Work and Pensions and the Welsh Assembly Government, and from within our own organisation. Success is celebrated and failure is fixed.
	The strategy has used a number of novel schemes to connect with the unemployed. It is not simply about sending a man or a woman in a grey suit with a big stick from the Government to tell the unemployed that they have to get back to work. In my constituency the strategy has dealt with those furthest away from the jobs market—unemployed people who may never have succeeded in school, who have lost confidence in themselves and faith in society, who have many problems with drugs and alcohol, and who lead chaotic lives and change address regularly.
	In order truly to connect with people who face such multiple barriers, we have developed a number of novel projects in conjunction and co-operation with many diverse local groups. I wish to mention a few of them. Rhyl football club operates football in the community, using unemployed people’s interest in football to sign them up for skills training and job placements in the local sports sector.
	Coastal Hawks is a project to train local young people in the art of falconry. They use those skills to keep seagulls and pigeons, which blight town centres and cause damage, away from Rhyl town centre. They dress up in medieval costume while doing this, engage with the public, and are in effect a tourist attraction. They were the subject of a TV programme—but now, because of cuts, they may be disbanded.
	The Hub, a youth project in Rhyl with 1,000 young people on its books, is located in the heart of the poorest community not only in Wales but, probably, in the whole country. It is self-financing, and in the past three years it has had two extensions that have been built by the local unemployed youngsters who use the centre. It has been part-financed by the 10 back to work organisations that want to gain access to those 1,000 young people. They rent office space from the Hub, and the money is then reinvested in the Hub.
	A local market has been established in Rhyl town centre, and the organisers are training 10 local unemployed people to take stalls on it. The organisers provide professional training through North Wales Training and give the trainees a stall to turn that theory into practice. Some of the people on the training scheme have multiple problems and are making a valiant attempt to recover from alcoholism. A separate TV programme is being made about that project.
	The Government say that they want to encourage enterprise, and I share their goal. We are doing it, and doing it successfully in Rhyl, the home of Albert Gubay’s Kwik Save and also of Iceland—two supermarket chains that changed the face of UK and world trading. We wish to rediscover that spirit of enterprise.

Chris Ruane: I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I shall come to that point shortly.
	The Dewi Sant centre in Rhyl works with dozens of people who have massive drug and alcohol problems, some of whom have literally been taken off the streets. Its clients are then given training away from the urban centre on a 7 acre farm donated by a local business man. They are being trained in the art of bee-keeping and other rural skills. They are organising a community harvest collecting unwanted apples, pears and berries from local people and turning the fruit into preserves.
	A week on Monday, I will be the master of ceremonies at the opening of a Jamie Oliver-type training restaurant called Taste. The building was empty for five years and has now been refitted to the highest standards by a top-class designer called Jamie Alcock. It will train young people how to cook, wait on tables, and generally run a restaurant. Those young people will then gain work in our local hospitality sector.
	Three weeks ago I was at the first presentation night for a back-to-work scheme aimed at 70 unemployed young men and women to improve their child care skills. This has a double benefit in that those skills will be used by them in bringing up their own children, but will also help to increase the quality and quantity of the child care work force. The presentation evening was highly emotional, as each young person got up to give a brief personal history and then went on to say how the scheme had rebuilt their confidence, returned their pride and helped them to gain employment. Of the first 10 who had been through the scheme, eight had gained employment and two had gone back to college.
	The training for many of the initiatives is supplied by a range of private sector trainers and also by Rhyl college, which was established by Labour 10 years ago. This £10 million college has had two extensions in four years—a further £7 million investment—and has won a UK beacon award for widening participation. It is located in the heart of the fifth poorest ward in Wales, and its outreach work, through many of the organisations I have mentioned, has helped virtually to eliminate the category of NEETS—those not in education, employment or training.
	Our local schools have also turned themselves round under the political leadership of an independent, Councillor Hugh Evans—I give credit to him—and a new chief executive, Mohammed Mehmet. The private sector, too, has played its full part. Tesco has said that it will take 50% of its new employees from the dole register. Serco, whose Welsh chief executive, Gareth Matthews, has driven our local back to work agenda for nearly 10 years, has located a regional office not in a leafy business park, but in the middle of the street with the greatest social need in the whole of Wales, creating 35 jobs. I am proud of our local back to work agenda.
	I now turn to my concerns about the Government’s back to work agenda. I am concerned that their new proposals will not recognise the good practice and progress that has gone before. They want to start from
	year zero and do away with all that Labour implemented—as much out of political spite as any desire to help the unemployed—and believe that any “lefty-sounding” package, such as the new deal, must be disparaged. The future jobs fund was viewed by seasoned practitioners as the best back to work scheme that has been created, because it recognised the dignity of the individual and dealt with people as individuals. It raised their confidence, gave them meaningful employment and, most of all, gave them a wage at the end of the week. The FJF was not like the skivvy schemes introduced by the Tories in their 18-year reign—but it was ended within weeks of the Government gaining power, without any independent assessment of its contribution to the back to work agenda.
	I am worried by the language, tone and philosophy of the Government. They look on unemployed people as feckless scroungers who should be chased back to work with a big stick even when no work is available—even when it is the Government themselves who are laying off those people. They are putting 500,000 workers on the dole and then stigmatising them. The voluntary sector and the public sector will walk away from Government initiatives that stigmatise people. The voluntary sector has no interest in that approach.
	I am worried about the directives coming from the DWP instructing local benefit advisers to trick people out of their benefits. They give advisers targets of two to three clients a week to punish by taking away their benefits. The Minister described those allegations made in The Guardian as claptrap—until he was shown the e-mail evidence that it was happening.
	I am worried that the Government have no policy for dealing with areas such as mine, with nearly 50% of its workers—13,000—in the public sector. The Government want to sack between 10% and 27% of these workers, pushing them on to the dole queue. Seaside towns such as mine, with many public sector workers, could end up like the coal and steel towns of the 1980s—the towns the Tories decimated. The Government say they want private enterprise to take on those workers. But when I tabled a parliamentary question on the budgets that the Government have allocated for enterprise clubs, the answer came back that £3 million had been allocated—£3 million for 3 million workers, or £1 each.
	My biggest worry is that nationally there is no growth strategy and no jobs strategy. Recent emergency meetings have been held in government to try, belatedly, to correct that, but the comprehensive spending review and the Budget did nothing to help create jobs and growth. As a result the economy, which was recovering under Labour, has flatlined for the past six months.
	It is not just me, a Labour Back Bencher, who is making these points; this is also what the experts are saying. The director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said that we should be seeing quite a sharp recovery, but that looking back over the past six months we have had no growth in output at all, and it is very disappointing. The chief economist at the Office for National Statistics said:
	“we have an economy on a plateau”.
	The Office for Budget Responsibility has revised down its growth forecast for 2011 from 2.6% to just 1.7%. That will have a devastating impact on jobs and growth.
	The gains in the private sector proclaimed by the Government were achieved largely as a result of what was done in the dying days of the Labour Government. The Government boast of an extra 350,000 jobs in the private sector, but most of those were created in the first quarter of their Administration.
	Unemployment in my constituency was 4.7% in December 2009. It fell dramatically, to 3.9%, in the six months to June 2010 under Labour. Under the Tories it has gone back up to 4.4%—and that is before the Government sack thousands of public sector workers in my constituency. I fear particularly for the unemployed young people in my constituency. There were 735 in December 2009, and that went down by nearly 30% in the six months to June 2010, to just 530, under Labour. Under the Tories, youth unemployment in my constituency has shot back up to 730. That happened as my local FJF took 450 young people off the dole. If those people were added on, the figure would be nearly 1,200 young people on the dole. Political spite has its price.
	“Panorama” is making a programme on the back to work agenda in seaside towns. It came to my town and presented me with a stick of rock, through which is written, “A JOB TO GET WORK”. It is a job to get work, because of many of the policies that the Government have introduced. The intricate web of employment opportunities that we have created in Rhyl over the past 10 years is in danger of being swamped if the Government’s plans are not properly introduced.
	The Government need to end their targets to force and trick people off benefits. They need to work co-operatively with the public and voluntary sector, especially where there is a proven track record. They need to change the language through which the back to work debate is being conducted. They need to ensure that those who are furthest from the jobs market are not left behind while the more able are cherry-picked by private sector companies. They need to put aside party politics, accept what was good practice under the previous Government and carry it on. They need to develop a strategy to deal with areas with huge numbers of public sector workers, so that we do not have coal and steel town-type unemployment in the next decade. If they are serious about the private sector providing jobs for sacked public sector workers, they need to give specific help to promote enterprise among the unemployed; £3 million is not enough. Most of all, the Government need to develop a coherent strategy to promote growth and jobs across the board, not as an afterthought but as a key component of getting the country back to full employment.

Chris Grayling: For at least the last five minutes of the hon. Gentleman’s contribution, that was a really disappointing speech. He spent 10 minutes setting out very eloquently the benefits of localism in Rhyl and the work that has been done by the local community to help young people and people of all ages into work. I listened with care, and he was actually making a good argument for the approach that we are taking in the Work programme. In a moment, I will set out how we hope that the Work programme will address some of the challenges faced by towns such as his.
	I am well aware of the excellent work that has been done on the ground in Rhyl. It is a good example of how a partnership between providers, local authorities, local business and other organisations to help people into employment can be fruitful. He referred to Working Links, and he will be aware that it is one of the preferred bidders for the Work programme across Wales. It has certainly built experience in Rhyl that can be used in the rest of Wales. However, that was where it stopped, and for the last five minutes of the hon. Gentleman’s speech, one would have believed that we were back to the rhetoric of the 1980s and the Morning Star. We heard a rather outdated view of class war and an apparent belief that Conservative Members and the Government have no interest in helping employment. He could not be more wrong. He needs to understand, first and foremost, the legacy that we inherited.
	One would have believed from listening to the hon. Gentleman that the past 15 years were a period of great employment success, but nothing could be further from the truth. We have gone through a long period in which we have consistently had almost 5 million people on out-of-work benefits. Although there have been increases in employment, such as the growth by almost 4 million in the past few years, we know thanks to the assiduous work of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who spent a lot of time in the previous Parliament teasing out of the previous Government the reality of the labour market, that far too many of those jobs—indeed, the majority—went not to unemployed people in this country but to people coming to the UK from overseas. That was a great tragedy and a great failure. Billions of pounds were spent on nationally organised back-to-work schemes that did not deliver the change that we needed.
	The hon. Gentleman made a good point when he said that he did not want to see the man or woman coming from Whitehall with a big stick to try to get people into work. I agree with him, but that was the failing of the previous Government’s policy. Programmes were designed in Whitehall, to a template designed in Whitehall and on a contractual basis designed in Whitehall, and they did not deliver the improvement that we needed. That is why we are determined to change things and have brought an entirely fresh approach to back-to-work programmes. I believe that that approach will help and harness the expertise that has been built up in his town of Rhyl over the months and years.
	Let me explain to the hon. Gentleman how the Work programme is designed to work. He will be aware that the contracting of the programme has involved not only individual prime contractors such as Working Links but a network of private small businesses, voluntary organisations, local charities, local groups with expertise on the ground in dealing with unemployment challenges and local public sector bodies. A number of local colleges are also involved in delivering the Work programme. We have decided to say to those providers that it is not the Government who know best how to get people into work, and who are best placed to design the programmes that will work in various parts of the country, it is the professionals on the ground.
	We have said that we will leave it to the providers to design what works. We want to encourage them to form excellent local partnerships such as the hon. Gentleman describes as having worked well in Rhyl. The only thing that we ask of them is that they succeed. We have put in
	place a payment-by-results regime, in which the prime contractors are investing £580 million over the next 12 months. We have confidence in their ability to build consortia of organisations and local partnerships, and in their capability to transform the lives of unemployed individuals around the country. We will reward them when they succeed in getting the unemployed into work. The scheme is designed to deliver the type of localism that he described in Rhyl. We believe that localism can work well around the country, and it is the essence of the Work programme and the black box approach.

Kerry McCarthy: I appreciate the need recognise that unemployed people are individuals with individual circumstances, to which the Minister has referred. My concern is that Jobcentre Plus does not always recognise that at a local level in respect, for example, of the new requirement that lone parents seek work when their youngest child is aged seven—the age is eight at the moment. I hear tales of people being told that they are regarded as not looking for work, because they say that they cannot work in the evenings because babysitters are unavailable, or because they turn down a job that starts at 9.30 am and they have to drop the kids off at school on the other side of town at 9 am. Will the Minister reassure me that such people will not be penalised?

Chris Grayling: I can absolutely give the hon. Lady that reassurance. She will know that there is a definition of reasonableness in deciding whether somebody should be required to take a job. We only expect lone parents with a child at primary school to take up a job that is consistent with school hours—it would be absurd to expect a lone parent to work a night shift, for example. I absolutely assure her that that is the case.
	While we are on that point, I will pick up the point that the hon. Gentleman raised on targets. The truth is that we discovered that problem, were horrified about it and put a stop to it immediately. However, is he aware of the roots of the problem? The roots are in a set of benchmarks that were introduced by Jobcentre Plus regions to judge whether appropriate sanctions were being achieved in each area, why there were differences, and whether policy was being applied uniformly. In an organisation that is, in my view, too target and detail-focused, the consequence was that in some areas, that was interpreted as a need to apply the individual target of which the hon. Gentleman is now aware.
	However, the hon. Gentleman might be unaware that the those benchmarks were introduced in 2006 under the previous Government. Jobcentre Plus is much too focused on targets and goals. Benchmarks are turned into individual targets for front-line staff, and the organisation’s culture does not appreciate the fact that we want front-line individuals to use discretion. We are going through a long change process after 13 years. Jobcentre Plus is used to taking diktats from the top, but this Government are saying, “We want you to use discretion in the front line and to take the right decisions in the interests of individual with whom you are dealing. We do not want you constantly to look back over your shoulder to ask what the centre is saying.” That is an important development, but it will take us time to feed through the whole organisation.
	Ironically, given what the hon. Gentleman said about targets, it dates back to changes made by the Labour party when it was in power. Indeed, last April it changed the rules actively to encourage an increase in the number of sanctions—again, something that we inherited. It is easy to look at the current Government and say, “What are you doing?”, but actually it is a problem which we inherited, which has grown and which we are now trying to unpick.
	The hon. Gentleman referred to the future jobs fund. I know that Labour Members are wedded to it, but in truth it cost four times as much per job outcome as the previous Government’s other scheme, the new deal for young people. At the end of the day, given that we have
	inherited the biggest budget deficit in Britain’s peacetime history, we have to take some hard decisions and look for value for money. The problem with the future jobs fund was that it was a six-month work placement in the public or voluntary sector with no clear pathway through to a long-term career. We took the view that it was much better to invest our money in apprenticeships, where the young person spends an extended period with a private sector employer gaining skills that will provide the foundations of a lifetime’s career and that will not simply lead to a shutter coming down at the end of six months.
	We are pretty early on in our apprenticeships programme, but we are already having considerable success in getting employers to take up apprenticeships. I was delighted to go to Newcastle earlier in the week and see the front page of The Journal announcing a great success for the paper’s campaign to encourage small employers to provide apprenticeships for young people. That is the kind of partnership that I really like. I absolutely agree with the
	hon. Gentleman about the importance of local partnerships. I want local employer groups, papers and public sector organisations working together to encourage young people to take up apprenticeships and to encourage local employers to provide apprenticeships. He will know that we are focused on ensuring that we provide work experience places for young people, but above all we are trying to ensure that decisions are taken locally. In the context of what is being done in Rhyl, there is nothing in the Work programme that prevents that work from continuing. Excellence will flourish in the Work programme. The whole system is designed to give local communities, providers on the ground and local organisations the freedom to do what works for the individual, which is what is important.
	In conclusion, I regard unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, as among the most important of this Government’s challenges. I am relishing the chance—
	House adjourned without Question put (Standing Order No. 9(7)).